Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy

00:00:00.000 | The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed,

00:00:07.500 | meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds

00:00:13.900 | and up to a couple minutes.

00:00:16.240 | Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so.

00:00:19.380 | Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons.

00:00:24.980 | Same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours.

00:00:29.140 | That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons

00:00:33.220 | amongst the nine nuclear armed nations.

00:00:36.540 | The sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds,

00:00:41.840 | you're talking about people miles out getting sucked up

00:00:44.540 | into that stem.

00:00:45.460 | When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that would be people.

00:00:48.420 | 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun.

00:00:54.580 | And that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning

00:00:57.340 | that follows.

00:00:58.100 | In addition to the launch on warning concept,

00:01:00.100 | there's this other insane concept

00:01:02.660 | called sole presidential authority.

00:01:06.100 | And you might think, in a democracy, that's impossible.

00:01:09.740 | You can't just start a war.

00:01:11.900 | Well, you can just start a nuclear war

00:01:13.780 | if you are the commander in chief, the president

00:01:16.380 | of the United States.

00:01:17.680 | In fact, you're the only one who can do that.

00:01:20.100 | We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away

00:01:26.580 | from nuclear Armageddon.

00:01:28.060 | No matter how nuclear war starts,

00:01:31.620 | it ends with everyone dead.

00:01:36.100 | The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobson,

00:01:39.340 | an investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist,

00:01:42.700 | and author of several amazing books on war, weapons,

00:01:47.740 | government secrecy, and national security,

00:01:50.780 | including the books titled Area 51, Operation Paperclip,

00:01:54.740 | The Pentagon's Brain, Phenomena, Surprise Kill Vanish,

00:01:58.700 | and her new book, Nuclear War.

00:02:03.660 | This is a Lex Friedman podcast.

00:02:05.820 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:02:07.700 | in the description.

00:02:08.940 | And now, dear friends, here's Annie Jacobson.

00:02:13.460 | Let's start with an immensely dark topic, nuclear war.

00:02:19.180 | How many people would a nuclear war between the United States

00:02:22.520 | and Russia kill?

00:02:24.500 | So I'm coming back at you with a very dark answer

00:02:29.420 | and a very big number.

00:02:33.380 | And that number is 5 billion people.

00:02:37.460 | You go second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour.

00:02:41.980 | What would happen if the nuclear war started?

00:02:47.980 | So there's a lot of angles on which

00:02:50.340 | I would love to talk to you about this.

00:02:53.260 | First, how would the deaths happen

00:02:55.900 | in the short term and the long term?

00:02:59.500 | So to start off, the reason I wrote the book

00:03:03.460 | is so that readers like you could see in appalling detail

00:03:10.340 | just how horrific nuclear war would be.

00:03:14.620 | And as you said, second by second, minute by minute.

00:03:18.500 | The book covers nuclear launch to nuclear winter.

00:03:23.900 | I purposely don't get into the politics that

00:03:26.300 | lead up to that or the national security maneuvers

00:03:28.860 | or the posturing or any of that.

00:03:30.180 | I just want people to know nuclear war is insane.

00:03:36.340 | And every source I interviewed for this book,

00:03:39.220 | from Secretary of Defense, all retired nuclear sub force

00:03:44.700 | commander, STRATCOM commander, FEMA director,

00:03:48.540 | on and on and on, nuclear weapons engineers,

00:03:50.460 | they all shared with me the common denominator

00:03:55.820 | that nuclear war is insane.

00:03:58.700 | First millions, then tens of millions,

00:04:01.460 | then hundreds of millions of people

00:04:03.260 | will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war.

00:04:08.100 | And then comes nuclear winter, where the billions

00:04:11.020 | happen from starvation.

00:04:13.300 | And so the shock power of all of this

00:04:16.820 | is meant for each and every one of us to say, wait, what?

00:04:25.180 | This actually exists behind the veil of national security.

00:04:28.620 | And I don't know--

00:04:30.500 | most people do not think about nuclear war on a daily basis.

00:04:34.380 | And yet, hundreds of thousands of people

00:04:37.100 | in the nuclear command and control

00:04:39.660 | are at the ready in the event it happens.

00:04:43.460 | But it doesn't take too many people to start one.

00:04:47.660 | In the words of Richard Garwin, who

00:04:50.380 | was the nuclear weapons engineer who

00:04:53.460 | drew the plans for the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb,

00:04:56.100 | the first thermonuclear bomb ever exploded in 1952,

00:05:02.460 | Garwin shared with me his opinion

00:05:05.180 | that all it takes is one nihilistic madman

00:05:09.700 | with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war.

00:05:14.180 | And that's how I begin the scenario.

00:05:16.820 | What are the different ways it could start?

00:05:19.220 | Like, literally, who presses a button?

00:05:21.660 | And what does it take to press a button?

00:05:24.020 | So the way it starts is in space,

00:05:28.700 | meaning the US Defense Department has a early warning

00:05:33.820 | system.

00:05:35.380 | And the system in space is called SIBRS.

00:05:37.740 | It's a constellation of satellites

00:05:39.560 | that is keeping an eye on all of America's enemies

00:05:44.060 | so that the moment an ICBM launches,

00:05:49.540 | the satellite in space--

00:05:51.060 | and I'm talking about 1/10 of the way to the moon.

00:05:53.860 | That's how powerful these satellites are in geosync.

00:05:57.860 | They see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM

00:06:04.380 | in a fraction of a second after it launches,

00:06:07.380 | a fraction of a second.

00:06:09.940 | And so there begins this horrifying policy

00:06:14.500 | called launch on warning, right?

00:06:17.100 | And that's the US counterattack, meaning the reason

00:06:21.340 | that the United States is so ferociously watching

00:06:25.860 | for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe

00:06:28.320 | is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US

00:06:34.580 | can move into action to immediately

00:06:37.180 | make a counterstrike.

00:06:39.220 | Because we have that policy, launch

00:06:41.700 | on warning, which is exactly like it says.

00:06:44.060 | It means the United States will not

00:06:46.540 | wait to absorb a nuclear attack.

00:06:50.620 | It will launch nuclear weapons in response

00:06:53.300 | before the bomb actually hits.

00:06:57.860 | So the president, as part of the launch on warning policy,

00:07:02.620 | has six minutes.

00:07:05.140 | I guess can't launch for six minutes,

00:07:06.980 | but at six minute mark from that first warning,

00:07:12.340 | the president can launch.

00:07:15.700 | And that was one of the most remarkable details

00:07:19.660 | to really nail down for this book

00:07:21.780 | when I was reporting this book and talking to Secretary

00:07:24.660 | of Defenses, for example, who are

00:07:26.140 | the people who advise the president on this matter.

00:07:29.100 | You say to yourself, wait a minute,

00:07:31.140 | how could that possibly be?

00:07:32.540 | And so let's unpack that.

00:07:34.340 | So in addition to the launch on warning concept,

00:07:37.680 | there's this other insane concept

00:07:40.220 | called sole presidential authority.

00:07:43.660 | And you might think, in a democracy, that's impossible.

00:07:47.300 | You can't just start a war.

00:07:49.460 | Well, you can just start a nuclear war

00:07:51.360 | if you're the commander in chief, the president

00:07:53.940 | of the United States.

00:07:55.260 | In fact, you're the only one who can do that.

00:07:58.420 | And we can get into later why that exists.

00:08:01.300 | I was able to get the origin story of that concept

00:08:03.940 | from Los Alamos.

00:08:04.860 | They declassified it for the book.

00:08:08.900 | But the idea behind that is that nuclear war

00:08:14.060 | will unfold so fast, only one person

00:08:17.900 | can be in charge, the president.

00:08:19.700 | He asks permission of no one, not the Secretary of Defense,

00:08:23.420 | not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

00:08:26.000 | not the US Congress.

00:08:28.080 | So built into that is this extraordinary speed

00:08:31.240 | you talk about, the six-minute window.

00:08:33.160 | And some people say, oh, that's ridiculous.

00:08:35.480 | How do we know that six-minute window?

00:08:37.400 | Well, here's the best sort of hitting

00:08:40.960 | the nail on the head statement I can give you,

00:08:43.120 | which is in President Reagan's memoirs,

00:08:47.240 | he refers to the six-minute window.

00:08:49.360 | And he calls it irrational, which it is.

00:08:53.240 | He says, how can anyone make a decision

00:08:56.720 | to launch nuclear weapons based on a blip on a radar scope,

00:09:01.200 | his words, to unleash Armageddon?

00:09:04.800 | And yet, that is the reality behind nuclear war.

00:09:08.320 | Just imagine sitting there, one person,

00:09:13.280 | because the president is a human being, sitting there,

00:09:17.880 | just got the warning that Russia launched.

00:09:20.000 | You have six minutes.

00:09:22.240 | You know, I meditate on my mortality every day,

00:09:27.200 | and here you would be sitting and meditating,

00:09:31.880 | contemplating not just your own mortality,

00:09:34.040 | but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones.

00:09:37.560 | Just imagining, what would be going through my head

00:09:40.040 | is all the people I know and love, like personally,

00:09:45.680 | and knowing that there'll be no more, most likely.

00:09:48.920 | And if they somehow survive, they will be suffering

00:09:53.120 | and will eventually die.

00:09:54.440 | I guess the question that kept coming up is,

00:09:59.280 | how do we stop this?

00:10:00.820 | Is it inevitable that it's going to be escalated

00:10:03.660 | to a full-on nuclear war that destroys everything?

00:10:06.920 | And it seems like it will be.

00:10:09.920 | It's inevitable.

00:10:11.640 | In the position of the president,

00:10:12.880 | it's almost inevitable that they have to respond.

00:10:16.320 | - I mean, one of the things I found shocking

00:10:18.360 | was how little, apparently, most presidents know

00:10:22.160 | about the responsibility

00:10:24.280 | that literally lays at their feet, right?

00:10:26.160 | So you may think through this six-minute window.

00:10:29.160 | I may think through this six-minute window.

00:10:32.080 | But what I learned, like for example,

00:10:35.480 | former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta

00:10:38.080 | was really helpful in explaining this to me,

00:10:40.400 | because before he was SECDEF,

00:10:42.880 | he served as the Director of the CIA.

00:10:47.880 | And before that, he was the White House Chief of Staff.

00:10:52.320 | And so he has seen these different roles

00:10:54.960 | that have been so close to the president.

00:10:58.380 | But he explained to me that when he was

00:11:00.640 | the White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton,

00:11:03.700 | he noticed how President Clinton didn't want

00:11:08.680 | to ever really deal with the nuclear issue,

00:11:11.300 | because he had so many other issues to deal with.

00:11:13.800 | And that only when Panetta became Secretary of Defense,

00:11:20.180 | he told me, did he really realize the weight of all of this?

00:11:25.200 | Because he knew he would be the person

00:11:28.800 | that the president would turn to

00:11:30.640 | were he to be notified of a nuclear attack.

00:11:35.880 | And by the way, it's the launch on warning.

00:11:37.760 | It's the ballistic missile

00:11:42.200 | seen from outer space by the satellite.

00:11:44.880 | And then there also must be a second confirmation

00:11:49.180 | from a ground radar system.

00:11:51.560 | But in that process, which is just a couple minutes,

00:11:55.260 | everyone is getting ready to notify the president.

00:11:58.140 | And one of the first people that gets notified by NORAD

00:12:01.680 | or by STRATCOM or by NRO,

00:12:05.620 | these different parties that all see

00:12:08.460 | the early warning data,

00:12:10.620 | one of the first people that's notified

00:12:12.220 | is the Secretary of Defense,

00:12:13.580 | as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

00:12:15.760 | because those two together are going to brief the president

00:12:20.260 | about, "Sir, you have six minutes to decide."

00:12:25.260 | And that's where you realize the immediacy of all of this

00:12:30.420 | is so counter to imagining the scenario

00:12:36.420 | and again, all the presidents come into office,

00:12:39.140 | I have learned understanding the idea of deterrence,

00:12:42.860 | this idea that we have these massive arsenals

00:12:45.780 | of nuclear weapons pointed at one another,

00:12:48.740 | ready to launch so that we never have nuclear war.

00:12:53.300 | But what we're talking about now is what if we did?

00:12:56.900 | What if we did?

00:12:57.740 | And what you've raised is like this really spooky,

00:13:01.740 | eerie subtext of the world right now,

00:13:05.300 | because many of the nuclear armed nations

00:13:10.300 | are in direct conflict with other nations.

00:13:14.340 | And for the first time in decades,

00:13:16.980 | nuclear threats are actually coming out of the mouths

00:13:21.620 | of leaders, this is shocking.

00:13:24.700 | - So deterrence, the polite implied assumption

00:13:29.700 | is that nobody will launch,

00:13:33.020 | and if they did, we would launch back

00:13:36.220 | and everybody would be dead.

00:13:38.180 | But that assumption falls apart completely,

00:13:41.220 | the whole philosophy of it falls apart

00:13:43.620 | once the first launch happens.

00:13:45.860 | - Absolutely.

00:13:46.700 | - Then you have six minutes to decide,

00:13:48.140 | "Wait a minute, are we going to hit back

00:13:51.100 | "and kill everybody on earth?

00:13:53.160 | "Or do we turn the other cheek

00:13:55.220 | "in the most horrific way possible?"

00:13:57.620 | - Well, when nuclear war starts,

00:13:59.260 | there's no like battle for New York or battle for Moscow,

00:14:02.820 | it's just literally, it was called

00:14:05.740 | in the Cold War, push button warfare,

00:14:07.620 | but in essence, that is what it is.

00:14:10.620 | Let's get some numbers on the table if you don't mind,

00:14:13.700 | because when you're saying like,

00:14:15.340 | "Wait a minute, we're just hoping that it holds,

00:14:18.860 | "let's just talk about Russia and the US,

00:14:22.280 | "the arsenals that are literally pointed

00:14:24.400 | "at one another right now."

00:14:26.180 | So the United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons

00:14:32.260 | deployed, meaning those weapons could launch

00:14:37.260 | in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple minutes.

00:14:43.900 | Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so.

00:14:47.020 | Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons,

00:14:52.020 | same scenario, their weapon systems are on par with ours.

00:14:55.780 | That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons

00:15:00.860 | amongst the nine nuclear armed nations.

00:15:04.300 | But when you think about those kind of arsenals

00:15:06.700 | of just between the United States and Russia,

00:15:09.580 | you realize everything can be launched

00:15:12.460 | in seconds and minutes.

00:15:14.740 | Then you realize the madness of Matt,

00:15:18.380 | that this idea that no one would launch

00:15:22.700 | because it would assure everyone's destruction.

00:15:25.820 | Yes, but what if someone did?

00:15:28.500 | And in my interviews with scores of top tier

00:15:32.260 | national security advisors, people who advise the president,

00:15:36.140 | people who are responsible for these decisions

00:15:38.260 | if they had to be made, every single one of them

00:15:41.580 | said it could happen.

00:15:44.500 | They didn't say this would never happen.

00:15:47.020 | And so the idea is worth thinking about

00:15:52.780 | because I believe that it pulls back the veil

00:15:58.780 | on a fundamental security that if someone were to use

00:16:03.740 | a tactical nuclear weapon, oh, well,

00:16:06.140 | it's just an escalation.

00:16:08.220 | It's far more than that.

00:16:09.460 | - So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon,

00:16:13.420 | maybe you can draw the line between a tactical

00:16:15.580 | and a strategic nuclear weapon that could be a catalyst.

00:16:20.580 | Like that's a very difficult thing to walk back from.

00:16:23.660 | - Oh my God, almost certainly.

00:16:25.220 | And again, every person in the national security environment

00:16:28.500 | tells, we'll agree with that, right?

00:16:30.620 | Certainly on the American side.

00:16:32.220 | Strategic weapons, those are like big weapons systems.

00:16:39.060 | America has a nuclear triad.

00:16:41.140 | We have our ICBMs, which are the silo-based missiles

00:16:46.140 | that have a nuclear warhead in the nose cone.

00:16:50.340 | And they can get from one continent to the other

00:16:52.660 | in roughly 30 minutes.

00:16:54.860 | Then we have our bombers, B-52s and B-2s

00:16:58.700 | that are nuclear capable.

00:17:00.220 | Those take travel time to get to another continent.

00:17:04.180 | Those can also be recalled.

00:17:05.620 | The ICBMs cannot be recalled or redirected once launched.

00:17:09.820 | - That one is a particularly terrifying one.

00:17:12.220 | So land-launched missiles, rockets with a warhead

00:17:16.660 | can't be recalled.

00:17:18.940 | - Cannot be recalled or redirected.

00:17:21.620 | And speaking of how little the president generally know,

00:17:25.540 | as we were talking a moment ago,

00:17:27.220 | President Reagan in 1983 gave a press conference

00:17:30.940 | where he misstated that submarine-launched

00:17:34.620 | ballistic missiles could be recalled.

00:17:36.500 | They cannot be recalled.

00:17:38.300 | So that gives you, here's the guy in charge of the arsenal

00:17:41.620 | if it has to get let loose.

00:17:43.340 | And he doesn't even know that they cannot be recalled.

00:17:47.340 | So this is the kind of misinformation and disinformation

00:17:50.660 | and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

00:17:55.660 | recently said when he was talking about the conflicts

00:18:00.300 | rising around the world, he said,

00:18:02.140 | "We are one misunderstanding,

00:18:05.340 | "one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon."

00:18:10.340 | - So just to sort of linger on the previous point

00:18:13.700 | of tactical nukes.

00:18:15.500 | So you're describing strategic nukes,

00:18:17.580 | land-launched bombers, submarine-launched,

00:18:21.860 | what are tactical nukes?

00:18:23.420 | - So that's the triad, right?

00:18:24.940 | And we have the triad and Russia has the triad.

00:18:29.220 | Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller warheads

00:18:32.820 | that were designed to be used in battle.

00:18:36.460 | And that is what Russia is sort of threatening

00:18:41.100 | to use right now.

00:18:42.300 | That is this idea that you would make a decision

00:18:46.940 | on the battlefield in an operational environment

00:18:51.220 | to use a tactical nuclear weapon.

00:18:53.100 | You should sort of upping the ante.

00:18:55.380 | But the problem is that all treaties are based

00:18:59.140 | on this idea of no nuclear use, right?

00:19:01.900 | You cannot cross that line.

00:19:03.740 | And so the what would happen if the line is crossed

00:19:07.860 | is so devastating to even consider.

00:19:12.300 | I think that the conversation is well worth having

00:19:15.700 | among everyone that is in a power of position.

00:19:19.980 | As the UN Secretary General said, this is madness, right?

00:19:25.780 | This is madness.

00:19:26.620 | We must come back from the brink.

00:19:28.340 | We are at the brink.

00:19:29.700 | - Can we talk about some other numbers?

00:19:34.780 | So you mentioned the number of warheads.

00:19:36.980 | So land-launched, how long does it take to travel

00:19:42.060 | across the ocean from the United States to Russia,

00:19:46.180 | from Russia to the United States,

00:19:47.380 | from China to the United States, approximately how long?

00:19:52.220 | - When I was writing an earlier book on DARPA,

00:19:55.980 | the Pentagon Science Agency,

00:19:58.580 | I went to a library down in San Diego

00:20:04.900 | called the Giesel Library to look at Herb York's papers.

00:20:08.740 | Herb York was the first chief scientist

00:20:11.220 | for the Pentagon for DARPA, then called ARPA.

00:20:14.700 | And I had been trying to get the number

00:20:16.620 | from the various agencies to answer,

00:20:20.500 | like what is the exact number and how do we know it?

00:20:23.180 | And like, does it change?

00:20:24.380 | And as technology advances, does that number reduce?

00:20:27.660 | All these kinds of questions,

00:20:28.940 | and no one will answer that question on an official level.

00:20:32.260 | And so much to my surprise,

00:20:34.300 | I found the answer in Herb York's dusty archive of papers.

00:20:39.780 | And this is information that was jealously guarded.

00:20:42.900 | I mean, it's not necessarily classified,

00:20:46.740 | but it certainly wasn't out there.

00:20:48.500 | And I felt like, wow, Herb York left these behind

00:20:53.220 | for someone like me to find, right?

00:20:57.140 | And what the process,

00:20:59.620 | he wanted to know the answer to your question,

00:21:02.700 | and as the guy in charge of it all.

00:21:04.620 | So he hired this group of scientists

00:21:07.460 | who then and still are in many ways

00:21:09.980 | like the supermen scientists of the Pentagon,

00:21:13.700 | and they're called the Jason scientists.

00:21:15.380 | Many conspiracies about them abound.

00:21:18.180 | I interviewed their founder

00:21:19.860 | and have interviewed many of them.

00:21:21.780 | But they whittled the number down to seconds, okay?

00:21:26.180 | Specifically for Herb York, and it goes like this,

00:21:29.260 | 'cause this is where my jaw dropped and I went, wow, okay?

00:21:32.900 | So 26 minutes and 40 seconds

00:21:37.300 | from a launch pad in the Soviet Union to the East Coast.

00:21:42.300 | And it happens in three phases, very simple,

00:21:44.940 | and interesting to remember,

00:21:46.180 | 'cause then suddenly all of this makes more sense.

00:21:49.620 | Boost phase, mid-course phase, and then terminal phase, okay?

00:21:54.620 | Boost phase, five minutes.

00:21:58.340 | That's when the rocket launches.

00:22:00.180 | So you just imagine a rocket going off the launch pad

00:22:03.780 | and the fire beneath it.

00:22:05.220 | Again, that's why the satellites can see it, okay?

00:22:07.860 | Now it's becoming visual.

00:22:09.100 | Now it makes sense to me, right?

00:22:11.740 | Five minutes, and that's where the rocket can be tracked.

00:22:16.060 | And then imagine learning, wait a minute,

00:22:18.980 | after five minutes,

00:22:19.940 | the rocket can no longer be seen from space.

00:22:22.380 | The satellite can only see the hot rocket exhaust.

00:22:25.780 | Then the missile enters its mid-course phase, 20 minutes.

00:22:29.500 | And that's the ballistic part of it,

00:22:31.340 | where it's kind of flying up

00:22:33.820 | at between 500 and 700 miles above the earth,

00:22:38.140 | and moving very fast, and with the earth,

00:22:41.020 | until it gets very close to its target.

00:22:44.420 | And the last 100 seconds are terminal phase.

00:22:47.900 | It's where the warhead re-enters the atmosphere

00:22:52.220 | and detonates.

00:22:53.580 | 26 minutes and 40 seconds.

00:22:58.060 | Now, in my scenario, I open with North Korea

00:23:02.540 | launching a one megaton nuclear warhead at Washington, DC.

00:23:07.540 | That's the nihilistic madman maneuver.

00:23:11.020 | That's the bolt out of the blue attack

00:23:13.020 | that everyone in Washington will tell you they're afraid of.

00:23:17.340 | And North Korea has a little bit different geography.

00:23:21.900 | And so I had MIT professor emeritus, Ted Postel,

00:23:26.540 | do the math, 33 minutes from a launch pad in Pyongyang

00:23:31.540 | to the East Coast of the United States.

00:23:34.820 | You get the idea, it's about 30 minutes.

00:23:37.620 | But hopefully now, that allows readers

00:23:40.940 | to suddenly see all this as a real,

00:23:43.980 | you almost see it as poetry,

00:23:47.500 | as terrible as that may sound.

00:23:49.140 | You can visualize it, and suddenly it makes sense.

00:23:52.340 | And I think the sense-making part of it

00:23:55.420 | is really what I'm after in this book

00:23:57.420 | because I want people to understand,

00:23:59.580 | on the one hand, it's incredibly simple.

00:24:02.660 | It's just the people that have made it so complicated.

00:24:05.820 | - But it's one of those things that can change

00:24:08.860 | all of world history in a matter of minutes.

00:24:11.780 | We just don't, as a human civilization,

00:24:13.780 | have experience with that.

00:24:15.140 | But it doesn't mean it'll never happen.

00:24:20.620 | It can happen just like that.

00:24:23.540 | I mean, I think what you're after,

00:24:26.740 | and I couldn't agree more with,

00:24:28.260 | is why is this fundamentally annihilating system,

00:24:33.260 | a system of mass genocide,

00:24:39.620 | as John Rubell in the book refers to it,

00:24:43.540 | why does it still exist?

00:24:45.900 | We've had 75 years since there've been two superpowers

00:24:51.500 | with the nuclear bomb.

00:24:53.500 | So that threat has been there for 75 years,

00:24:56.060 | and we have managed to stay alive.

00:24:59.620 | One of the reasons why so many of the sources

00:25:03.620 | in the book agreed to talk to me,

00:25:05.140 | people who had not previously gone on the record

00:25:08.500 | about all of this,

00:25:09.420 | was because they are now approaching the end of their lives.

00:25:14.020 | They spent their lives dedicated

00:25:16.780 | to preventing nuclear World War III.

00:25:20.620 | And they'll be the first people to tell you

00:25:23.300 | we're closer to this as a reality than ever before.

00:25:27.260 | And so the only bright side of any of this

00:25:30.260 | is that the answer lies most definitely in communication.

00:25:33.740 | - So there's a million other questions here.

00:25:37.820 | I think the details are fascinating

00:25:41.580 | and important to understand.

00:25:42.980 | So one, you also say nuclear submarines.

00:25:47.900 | You mentioned about 30 minutes, 26, 33 minutes,

00:25:51.820 | but with nuclear submarines,

00:25:54.340 | that number can be much, much lower.

00:25:56.780 | So how long does it take for a warhead to a missile

00:26:00.300 | to reach the East Coast of the United States

00:26:03.060 | from a submarine?

00:26:04.220 | - Just when you thought it was really bad,

00:26:06.260 | and then you kind of realize about the submarines.

00:26:08.460 | I mean, the submarines are what are called

00:26:10.460 | second strike capacity, right?

00:26:12.100 | And, you know, submarines were described to me this way.

00:26:16.380 | They are as dangerous to civilization.

00:26:18.620 | And let me say a nuclear armed, nuclear powered submarine

00:26:22.620 | is as dangerous to civilization as an asteroid, okay?

00:26:27.620 | They are unstoppable.

00:26:29.300 | They are unlocatable.

00:26:31.540 | The former chief of the nuclear submarine forces,

00:26:35.980 | Admiral Michael Connor told me,

00:26:38.740 | it's easier to find a grapefruit sized object in space

00:26:44.220 | than a submarine under the sea, okay?

00:26:47.420 | So these things are like hell machines.

00:26:50.540 | And they're moving around throughout the oceans,

00:26:55.100 | ours, Russia's, China's, maybe North Korea's, constantly.

00:26:59.620 | And we now know they're sneaking up

00:27:02.300 | to the East and West Coast of the United States

00:27:04.820 | within a couple hundred miles.

00:27:06.380 | How do we know that?

00:27:07.220 | Why do we know that?

00:27:08.180 | Well, I found a document inside of a budget

00:27:12.540 | that the defense department was going to Congress

00:27:14.540 | for more money recently,

00:27:16.180 | and showed maps of precisely where these submarines,

00:27:20.380 | how close they were getting to the Eastern seaboard.

00:27:22.980 | - So wait, wait, wait.

00:27:23.820 | So nuclear subs are getting within 200 miles?

00:27:27.420 | - Couple hundred miles, yes.

00:27:28.620 | They weren't precise on the number,

00:27:29.820 | but when you look at the map. - Couple hundred.

00:27:31.020 | - Yep.

00:27:32.300 | And that's when you're talking about under 10 minutes

00:27:35.420 | from launch to strike.

00:27:37.380 | - Undetectable.

00:27:38.580 | - And they're undetectable.

00:27:39.700 | The map making is done after the fact

00:27:41.980 | because of a lot of underwater surveillance systems

00:27:45.060 | that we have.

00:27:46.540 | But in real time, you cannot find a nuclear submarine.

00:27:51.540 | And just the way a submarine launches,

00:27:54.700 | goes 150 feet below the surface

00:27:57.180 | to launch its ballistic missile.

00:27:59.740 | I mean, it comes out of the missile tube

00:28:02.300 | and with enough thrust that the thrusters,

00:28:07.300 | they ignite outside the water,

00:28:10.260 | and then they move into boost.

00:28:12.100 | And so the technology involved is just stunning and shocking

00:28:16.060 | and again, trillions of dollars spent

00:28:18.620 | so that we never have a nuclear war.

00:28:21.300 | But my God, what if we did?

00:28:22.860 | - As you write,

00:28:26.380 | they're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse.

00:28:30.020 | What a terrifying label.

00:28:33.140 | I mean, one of the things you also write about,

00:28:38.740 | so for the land launched ones,

00:28:40.660 | they're presumably underground.

00:28:43.620 | So the silos, how long does it take to go

00:28:46.980 | from like pressing the button

00:28:49.020 | to them emerging from underground for launch?

00:28:52.060 | And is that part detectable or it's only the heat?

00:28:55.480 | - So what's interesting about the silos,

00:28:57.180 | America has 400 silos, right?

00:28:59.540 | We've had more.

00:29:00.500 | But we have 400 and they're underground

00:29:03.980 | and they're called minute men, right?

00:29:06.980 | After the revolutionary war heroes.

00:29:08.820 | But the sort of joke in Washington

00:29:12.100 | is they're not called minute men for nothing

00:29:14.220 | because they can launch in one minute, right?

00:29:16.820 | So the president orders the launch of the ICBMs,

00:29:20.980 | ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

00:29:25.180 | He orders the launch and they launch 60 seconds later.

00:29:28.420 | And then they take 30 some odd minutes

00:29:30.460 | to get to where they're going.

00:29:32.580 | The submarines take about 14 or 15 minutes

00:29:37.500 | from the presidential, from the launch command

00:29:40.780 | to actually launching.

00:29:43.020 | And that has to do, I surmise,

00:29:44.780 | with the location of the submarine, its depth.

00:29:48.380 | Some of these things are so highly classified

00:29:51.620 | and others, other details are shockingly available

00:29:55.620 | if you look deep enough or if you ask enough questions

00:29:58.540 | and you can go from one document to the next to the next

00:30:01.820 | and really find these answers.

00:30:03.540 | - Not to ask top secret questions,

00:30:05.260 | but to what degree do you think the Russians

00:30:08.860 | know the locations of the silos in the US and vice versa?

00:30:12.700 | - Lex, you and I can find the location

00:30:15.300 | of every silo right now. - Oh no.

00:30:16.820 | - They're all there.

00:30:17.660 | And before they were there on Google,

00:30:20.060 | they were there in maps because we're a democracy

00:30:22.820 | and we make these things known, okay?

00:30:25.000 | Now what's tricky is that Russia and North Korea

00:30:29.700 | rely upon what are called road mobile launchers, right?

00:30:33.700 | So Russia has a lot of underground silos.

00:30:36.780 | All of the scenario takes you through

00:30:38.900 | these different facilities that really do exist

00:30:41.460 | and they're all sourced with how many weapons they have

00:30:43.940 | and their launch procedures and whatnot.

00:30:46.300 | But in addition to having underground silos,

00:30:49.960 | they have road mobile launchers.

00:30:52.780 | And that means you just have one of these giant ICBMs

00:30:56.500 | on a 22 axle truck that can move

00:31:01.500 | stealthily around the country

00:31:04.340 | so that it can't be targeted by the US Defense Department.

00:31:08.540 | We don't have those in America

00:31:10.260 | because presumably the average American

00:31:13.540 | isn't gonna go for like the ICBM road mobile launcher

00:31:17.420 | driving down the street in your town or city,

00:31:21.240 | which is why the Defense Department will justify

00:31:25.300 | we need the second strike capacity capability,

00:31:28.380 | the submarines, right?

00:31:30.340 | Because, you know, I mean, the wonky stuff

00:31:34.100 | that is worth looking into as a,

00:31:36.020 | if you really dig the book and are like, wait a minute,

00:31:38.860 | it's all footnoted where you can learn more

00:31:41.460 | about how these systems have changed over time

00:31:45.040 | and why more than anything,

00:31:48.140 | it's very difficult to get out of this catch-22 conundrum

00:31:52.700 | that, you know, we need nuclear weapons to keep us safe.

00:31:56.500 | That is the real enigma

00:31:59.460 | because the other guys have them, right?

00:32:03.100 | And the other guys have sort of more sinister ways

00:32:05.860 | of using them, or at least that's what the nomenclature

00:32:08.820 | out of the Pentagon will always be

00:32:10.900 | when anyone tries to say,

00:32:12.100 | we just need to really think about full disarmament.

00:32:16.500 | - You've written about intelligence agencies.

00:32:19.180 | How good are the intelligence agencies on this?

00:32:21.820 | How much does CIA know about the Russian launch sites

00:32:26.380 | and capabilities and command and control procedures

00:32:31.380 | and all of this and vice versa?

00:32:33.820 | - I mean, all of this, because it's decades old,

00:32:36.140 | is really well-known.

00:32:38.620 | If you go to the Federation of American Scientists,

00:32:41.900 | they have a team led by a guy called Hans Christensen

00:32:45.060 | who runs what's called the Nuclear Notebook.

00:32:47.820 | And he and his team every year are keeping track

00:32:50.680 | of this number of warheads

00:32:52.340 | on these number of weapon systems.

00:32:54.060 | And because of the treaties,

00:32:55.680 | the different signatories to the treaty

00:32:57.980 | all report these numbers.

00:32:59.900 | And of course, the different intelligence community,

00:33:02.780 | people are keeping track of what's being, you know,

00:33:06.380 | revealed honestly and reported with transparency

00:33:09.980 | and what is being hidden.

00:33:11.420 | The real issue is the new systems

00:33:15.460 | that Russia is working on right now.

00:33:17.560 | And that will lead us, you know,

00:33:20.160 | we are kind of moving into an era

00:33:22.940 | whereby the threat of actually having new weapon systems

00:33:27.940 | that are nuclear capable is very real

00:33:31.540 | because of the escalating tensions around the world.

00:33:35.260 | And that's where the CIA, I would guess,

00:33:36.860 | is doing most of its work right now.

00:33:38.660 | - So most of your research is kind of looking at

00:33:41.640 | the older versions of the system.

00:33:44.540 | And presumably there's potentially secret development

00:33:47.940 | of new ones, hopefully.

00:33:50.140 | - Which violates treaties.

00:33:51.520 | So yes, that is where the intelligence agencies,

00:33:54.640 | but you know, at a point it's overkill,

00:33:58.080 | literally and figuratively, right?

00:34:00.880 | People are up in arms about these hypersonic weapons.

00:34:03.440 | Well, we have a hypersonic weapons program,

00:34:06.180 | you know, Falcon, Google Blackswift, right?

00:34:08.760 | This is Lockheed's doing, you know,

00:34:12.280 | DARPA exists to create the vast weapon systems of the future.

00:34:17.280 | That is its job.

00:34:19.720 | It has been doing that since its creation in 1957.

00:34:23.640 | I would never believe that we aren't ahead of everyone.

00:34:28.480 | Call me, you know, over-informed or naive,

00:34:31.280 | one or the other, that would be my position

00:34:33.840 | because DARPA works from the chicken or the egg scenario,

00:34:36.700 | you know, that like once you learn about something,

00:34:40.640 | once you learn Russia's created this, you know,

00:34:43.080 | typhoon submarine, which may or may not, you know,

00:34:46.480 | be viable, it's too late if you don't already have one.

00:34:50.600 | - We'll probably talk about DARPA a little bit.

00:34:52.960 | One of the things that makes me sad about Lockheed,

00:34:56.960 | many things make me sad about Lockheed,

00:34:59.360 | but one of the things is because it's very top secret,

00:35:02.180 | you can't show off all the incredible engineering

00:35:05.180 | going on there.

00:35:06.300 | The other thing that's more philosophical, DARPA also,

00:35:09.760 | is that war seems to stimulate most of our,

00:35:14.080 | not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation

00:35:18.920 | in engineering, and so, but that's also the pragmatic fact

00:35:23.520 | of life on Earth, is that the risk of annihilation

00:35:28.520 | is a great motivator for innovation,

00:35:32.880 | for engineering, and so on.

00:35:34.320 | But yes, I would not discount the United States

00:35:39.320 | in its ability to build the weapons of the future,

00:35:42.960 | nuclear included, again, terrifying.

00:35:45.880 | Can you tell me about the nuclear football, as it's called?

00:35:50.480 | - I think Americans are familiar with the football,

00:35:53.200 | at least anyone who sort of, you know,

00:35:54.720 | follows national security concepts,

00:35:56.640 | because it's a satchel, it's a leather satchel

00:35:59.500 | that is always with a military aid,

00:36:02.880 | in Secret Service nomenclature, that's the MIL-AID,

00:36:06.640 | and he's trailing around the president 24/7,

00:36:11.440 | 365 days a year, and also the vice president, by the way,

00:36:15.440 | with the ability to launch nuclear war

00:36:18.660 | in that six-minute window all the time, okay?

00:36:22.080 | That is also called the football,

00:36:27.120 | and it's always with the president.

00:36:29.360 | To report this part of the book,

00:36:30.720 | I interviewed a lot of people in the Secret Service

00:36:32.760 | that are with the president and talk about this,

00:36:35.180 | and the director of the Secret Service,

00:36:37.800 | a guy called Lou Merletti, told me a story

00:36:41.040 | that I just really found fascinating.

00:36:45.200 | He was also in charge of the president's detail,

00:36:47.680 | President Clinton this was,

00:36:49.760 | before he was director of the Secret Service,

00:36:51.760 | and he told me the story about how, he said,

00:36:55.120 | "The football is with the president at all times, period."

00:36:58.840 | Okay?

00:37:00.080 | They were traveling to Syria,

00:37:02.900 | and Clinton was meeting with President Assad,

00:37:06.000 | and they got into an elevator,

00:37:10.480 | Clinton and the Secret Service team,

00:37:11.760 | and one of Assad's guys was like, "No,"

00:37:14.600 | like about the mill aid, and Lou said,

00:37:17.820 | "It was like a standoff, because there was no way

00:37:20.960 | "they were not going to have the president

00:37:24.180 | "with his football in an elevator."

00:37:27.000 | And it kind of sums up, for me anyways,

00:37:31.300 | you realize what goes into

00:37:34.520 | every single one of these decisions.

00:37:37.160 | You realize the massive system of systems

00:37:40.800 | behind every item you might just see

00:37:44.880 | in passing and glancing on the news,

00:37:46.900 | as you see the mill aid carrying that satchel.

00:37:49.140 | Well, what's in that satchel?

00:37:51.160 | I really dug into that to report this book.

00:37:55.960 | What is in that satchel?

00:37:57.040 | Okay, so, well, okay, first of all,

00:37:59.760 | that is, you know, people always say,

00:38:01.080 | "It's incredibly classified."

00:38:02.840 | I mean, people talk about UFOs.

00:38:04.520 | "It's incredibly," I mean, come on, guys,

00:38:07.240 | that is nothing burger, right?

00:38:08.920 | You wanna know what's really classified?

00:38:10.880 | What's in that football, right?

00:38:12.280 | What's in that satchel?

00:38:13.620 | But the PEDE, Presidential Emergency Action Directives,

00:38:17.360 | right, those have never been leaked.

00:38:19.800 | No one knows what they are.

00:38:21.600 | What we do know from one of the mill aides

00:38:24.480 | who spoke on the record, a guy called Buzz Patterson,

00:38:26.920 | he describes the president's orders, right?

00:38:30.200 | So if a nuclear war has begun,

00:38:32.200 | if the president has been told there are nuclear missiles,

00:38:36.160 | one or more coming at the United States,

00:38:38.020 | you have to launch in a counter-attack, right?

00:38:41.320 | The red clock is ticking,

00:38:42.660 | you have to get the blue impact clock ticking.

00:38:46.040 | He needs to look at this list to decide

00:38:49.800 | what targets to strike and what weapon systems to use.

00:38:54.800 | And that is what is on, according to Buzz Patterson,

00:38:58.760 | a piece of like sort of laminated plastic,

00:39:02.520 | he described it like a Denny's menu.

00:39:05.400 | And from that menu, the president chooses targets

00:39:10.400 | and chooses weapon systems.

00:39:12.620 | - And it's probably super old school,

00:39:16.160 | like all top secret systems are,

00:39:20.000 | because they have to be tested over and over and over

00:39:22.120 | and over and over.

00:39:23.280 | - Yes, and it's non-digital.

00:39:24.820 | - Non-digital.

00:39:25.920 | - It might literally be a Denny's menu from hell.

00:39:29.240 | - Right, and there's a, meanwhile,

00:39:31.240 | I learned this only in reporting the book.

00:39:33.880 | There is a identical black book

00:39:37.360 | inside the STRATCOM bunker in Nebraska, okay?

00:39:42.360 | So let me, three command bunkers are involved

00:39:45.520 | when nuclear war begins, right?

00:39:47.320 | There's the bunker beneath the Pentagon,

00:39:49.520 | which is called the National Military Command Center, okay?

00:39:53.880 | Then there is the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain,

00:39:57.240 | which everyone has, many people have heard of

00:40:00.160 | because it's been made famous in movies, right?

00:40:02.280 | That is a very real bunker.

00:40:04.480 | And then there is a third bunker,

00:40:06.160 | which people are not so familiar with,

00:40:08.560 | which is the bunker beneath Strategic Command in Nebraska.

00:40:12.880 | And so it's described to me this way,

00:40:15.600 | the Pentagon bunker is the beating heart.

00:40:20.240 | The Cheyenne Mountain bunker is the brains.

00:40:24.040 | And the STRATCOM bunker is the muscle.

00:40:27.420 | The STRATCOM commander will receive word

00:40:32.520 | from the president, launch orders,

00:40:34.960 | and then directs the 150,000 people beneath him,

00:40:39.960 | what to do, okay, from the bunker beneath STRATCOM.

00:40:45.480 | That's before he runs, you know, he gets the orders,

00:40:48.840 | then he has to run out of the building

00:40:50.200 | and jump onto a, what's called the doomsday plane.

00:40:53.160 | We'll get into that in a minute.

00:40:54.320 | Let me just finish the, I mean, but again,

00:40:56.760 | these are the details, this is like,

00:41:00.200 | these are the systematic sequential details

00:41:05.080 | that happen in seconds and minutes.

00:41:07.680 | And reporting them, I never cease to be amazed

00:41:11.840 | by what a system it is, you know?

00:41:15.640 | A follows B, you know, it's just numerical, right?

00:41:19.640 | - Yeah, but as we discuss this procedure,

00:41:22.160 | each individual person that follows that procedure

00:41:25.200 | might lose the big picture of the whole thing.

00:41:27.500 | I mean, especially when you realize what is happening,

00:41:34.520 | that almost out of fear, you just follow the steps.

00:41:38.760 | - Yep, or okay, so imagine this,

00:41:40.680 | imagine being the president, you got that six minute win.

00:41:43.080 | You have to, you're looking at your list of strike options.

00:41:48.080 | You're being briefed by your chairman

00:41:49.840 | of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and your SACDF.

00:41:52.600 | And this other really spooky detail,

00:41:56.920 | in the STRATCOM bunker,

00:41:59.300 | in addition to the nuclear strike advisor

00:42:02.640 | who can answer very specific questions,

00:42:05.240 | if the president's like, wait a minute,

00:42:06.440 | why are we striking that and not that?

00:42:08.680 | There's also a weather officer.

00:42:11.320 | And this is the kind of human detail

00:42:14.320 | that kept me up at night.

00:42:15.840 | Because that weather officer is in charge

00:42:19.420 | of explaining to the president really fast

00:42:23.800 | how many people are going to die

00:42:26.120 | and how many people are going to die in minutes,

00:42:31.120 | weeks, months, and years from radiation fallout.

00:42:37.340 | - Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system.

00:42:41.040 | - Yes, yes.

00:42:43.720 | And so these kinds of, the humanness,

00:42:47.200 | balanced out with the mechanization of it all,

00:42:53.320 | is, it's just really grotesque.

00:42:58.080 | - So the Doomsday Plane from STRATCOM,

00:43:01.240 | what's that, where is it going?

00:43:03.480 | What's on it?

00:43:04.320 | - Right, it's, okay, ready?

00:43:06.240 | It's gonna fly in circles.

00:43:07.600 | That's where it's going.

00:43:09.760 | It's flying in circles around the United States of America

00:43:14.360 | so that nuclear weapons can be launched from the air

00:43:19.360 | after the ground systems are taken out

00:43:24.880 | by the incoming ICBMs

00:43:26.520 | or the incoming submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

00:43:30.520 | This has been in play since the '50s.

00:43:33.540 | This is, these are the contingency plans

00:43:37.920 | for when nuclear war happens.

00:43:40.080 | So again, going back to this absurd paradox,

00:43:44.060 | nuclear war will never happen.

00:43:46.360 | You know, mutual assured destruction,

00:43:48.200 | that is why deterrence will hold.

00:43:49.880 | Well, I found a talk that the deputy director of STRATCOM

00:43:54.880 | gave to a very close-knit group

00:43:58.200 | where he said, yes, deterrence will hold,

00:44:00.600 | but if it fails, everything unravels.

00:44:03.560 | And think about that word, unravels, right?

00:44:05.960 | And the unraveling is, you know,

00:44:08.200 | the doomsday plane launches.

00:44:09.740 | The STRATCOM commander jumps in, he's in that plane,

00:44:12.760 | he's flying around the United States,

00:44:15.000 | and he's making decisions

00:44:17.440 | because the Pentagon's been taken out.

00:44:20.020 | At 9/11, by the way, Bush was in the doomsday plane.

00:44:25.280 | - And Bush had to make decisions quickly,

00:44:29.080 | but not so quickly, not as quickly

00:44:31.160 | as he would have needed, have done

00:44:33.000 | if there's a nuclear launch.

00:44:35.200 | - I mean-- - Six minutes.

00:44:37.600 | - It basically happens in three acts.

00:44:39.400 | There's the first 24 minutes, the next 24 minutes,

00:44:44.400 | and the last 24 minutes.

00:44:47.260 | And that is the reality of nuclear weapons.

00:44:51.200 | - What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States?

00:44:58.920 | How many nuclear missiles can be stopped?

00:45:02.400 | - I was at a dinner party with a very informed person,

00:45:06.680 | right, like somebody who really, you know,

00:45:09.680 | should have known this.

00:45:10.680 | And this is when I was considering writing

00:45:14.280 | and reporting this book, and he said to me,

00:45:17.080 | "Oh, Annie, that would never happen

00:45:19.960 | "because of our powerful interceptor system, okay?"

00:45:24.960 | Well, he's wrong.

00:45:26.080 | Let me tell you about our powerful interceptor system.

00:45:28.960 | First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles,

00:45:32.920 | total, period, full stop.

00:45:35.080 | Let me repeat, 44, okay?

00:45:38.340 | Earlier, we were talking about Russia's 1,670

00:45:43.340 | deployed nuclear weapons.

00:45:45.360 | How are those 44 interceptor missiles gonna work, right?

00:45:49.980 | And they also have a success rate of around 50%,

00:45:55.880 | so they work 50% of the time.

00:45:58.080 | There are 40 of them in Alaska,

00:46:00.760 | and there are four of them

00:46:02.800 | at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, okay?

00:46:06.120 | And they are responsible at about nine minutes

00:46:09.360 | into the scenario, right,

00:46:11.460 | after the ICBM has finished

00:46:14.600 | that five-minute boost phase we talked about.

00:46:16.760 | Now it's in mid-course phase,

00:46:19.120 | and the ground radar systems have identified,

00:46:24.080 | yes, this is an incoming ICBM.

00:46:28.520 | And now the interceptor missiles have to launch, right?

00:46:32.240 | It's essentially shooting a missile with a missile.

00:46:34.720 | Inside the interceptor, which is just a big giant rocket,

00:46:38.600 | in its nose cone, it has what's called

00:46:42.200 | the aptly named exoatmospheric kill vehicle, okay?

00:46:47.200 | There's no explosives in that thing.

00:46:49.480 | It's literally just going to take out the warhead,

00:46:54.480 | ideally, with force.

00:46:57.560 | So one of them is going like Mach 20.

00:47:01.200 | I mean, the speeds at which these two moving objects

00:47:05.240 | hurtling through space are going is astonishing.

00:47:08.700 | And the fact that interception is even possible

00:47:12.720 | is really remarkable,

00:47:13.780 | but it's only possible 50% of the time.

00:47:16.880 | - Is it possible that we only know about 44,

00:47:19.560 | but there could be a lot more?

00:47:20.760 | - No, impossible.

00:47:22.720 | That I would be willing to bet.

00:47:24.320 | - And how well tested are these interceptors?

00:47:26.840 | - Well, that's where we get the success rate

00:47:28.480 | that's around 50%, because of the test, right?

00:47:30.800 | And actually, the interceptor program is,

00:47:33.320 | are you ready for this?

00:47:34.160 | It's on strategic pause, right, right now.

00:47:37.760 | Meaning the interceptor missiles are there,

00:47:39.880 | but developing them and making them more effective

00:47:43.160 | is on strategic pause,

00:47:44.440 | because they can't be made more effective, right?

00:47:47.720 | People have these fantasies

00:47:49.180 | that we have a system like the Iron Dome,

00:47:52.040 | and they see this in current events,

00:47:54.400 | and they're like, "Oh, our interceptors would do that."

00:47:56.800 | It's just simply not true.

00:47:58.580 | - Why can't an Iron Dome-like system

00:48:01.280 | be constructed for nuclear warheads?

00:48:03.880 | - We have systems I write about called the THAAD system,

00:48:06.400 | which is ground-based,

00:48:07.520 | and then the Aegis system, which is on vessels.

00:48:10.720 | And these are great at shooting down some rockets,

00:48:15.600 | but they can only shoot them sort of one at a time.

00:48:19.280 | You cannot shoot the mother load as it's coming in.

00:48:22.260 | Those are the smaller systems, right?

00:48:23.960 | The tactical nuclear weapons.

00:48:25.360 | And by the way, our THAAD systems are all deployed overseas,

00:48:28.840 | and our Aegis systems are all out at sea.

00:48:31.160 | And again, reporting that, I was like, "Wait, what?"

00:48:34.040 | You know, you have to really hunker down.

00:48:35.720 | Are we sure about this?

00:48:37.360 | People really don't wanna believe this.

00:48:39.120 | It's an actual fact.

00:48:40.480 | After 9/11, Congress considered putting Aegis missiles

00:48:44.920 | and maybe even THAAD systems

00:48:46.080 | along the West Coast of the United States

00:48:47.940 | to specifically deal with the threats

00:48:49.840 | against nuclear-armed North Korea,

00:48:51.980 | but it hasn't done so yet.

00:48:53.440 | And again, you have to ask yourself,

00:48:54.880 | "Wait a minute, this is insanity."

00:48:57.280 | One nuclear weapon gets by any of these systems,

00:49:01.320 | and it's full-out nuclear warfare.

00:49:03.960 | So that's not the solution.

00:49:07.400 | More nuclear weapons is not the solution.

00:49:10.600 | - I'm looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea.

00:49:14.140 | How many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have?

00:49:17.560 | So does the current system, as we described it,

00:49:21.920 | the interceptors and so on,

00:49:23.720 | have a hope against the North Korean attack,

00:49:27.820 | the one that you mentioned people are worried about?

00:49:31.000 | - So North Korea has 50,

00:49:35.440 | let's say 50 nuclear weapons right now.

00:49:39.000 | Some NGOs put it at more than 100.

00:49:42.640 | It's impossible to know

00:49:44.040 | because North Korea's nuclear weapons program

00:49:47.020 | has no transparency.

00:49:48.800 | They're the only nuclear-armed nation

00:49:51.720 | that doesn't announce when they do a ballistic missile test.

00:49:55.560 | Everyone else does.

00:49:56.680 | No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident, right?

00:49:59.600 | So if Russia's gonna launch an ICBM, they tell us.

00:50:02.040 | If we're gonna launch one,

00:50:03.160 | and I'm talking test runs here,

00:50:05.080 | you know, with a dummy warhead,

00:50:06.360 | we tell them, not North Korea.

00:50:09.600 | That's a fact, okay?

00:50:11.200 | So we're constantly up against the fear of North Korea.

00:50:15.080 | In this scenario,

00:50:16.120 | I have the incoming North Korean one megaton,

00:50:20.480 | you know, weapon coming in,

00:50:22.120 | and the interceptor system tries to shoot it down.

00:50:26.720 | So there's not enough time,

00:50:29.160 | and this, by the way, I ran through by all, you know,

00:50:32.120 | generals from the Pentagon who run these scenarios

00:50:35.200 | for NORAD, right?

00:50:36.720 | And confirmed all of this as fact.

00:50:38.640 | This is not, this is the situation, right?

00:50:41.960 | So in this scenario, I have the nuclear ICBM coming in.

00:50:46.960 | The interceptor missiles try to shoot down the warhead.

00:50:49.880 | The capability is not like what's called shoot, you know,

00:50:53.920 | and look.

00:50:54.760 | They can't, there's not enough time to go like,

00:50:57.360 | and we're gonna try to get it.

00:50:58.760 | We missed it.

00:50:59.600 | Okay, let's go for another one.

00:51:00.880 | So you have to go poof, poof, poof, poof, right?

00:51:03.680 | So in my scenario, we fire off four,

00:51:06.120 | which is about what I was told would, one to four,

00:51:08.800 | because you're worried about the next one

00:51:10.120 | that's gonna come in.

00:51:11.160 | You're gonna use up 10% of your missile force,

00:51:13.860 | of your interceptor force on one, and all four miss,

00:51:17.080 | and that's totally plausible.

00:51:18.540 | - Right.

00:51:20.500 | How likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms,

00:51:25.760 | taken as real, all this kind of stuff in this picture?

00:51:28.600 | So like you've, we've kind of assumed

00:51:31.660 | the detection works correctly.

00:51:33.660 | How likely is it possible?

00:51:36.680 | Like anywhere, you described this long chain of events

00:51:39.760 | that can happen.

00:51:41.200 | How possible is it just to make a mistake,

00:51:43.080 | a stupid human mistake along the way?

00:51:45.760 | - There've been at least six known like absolute,

00:51:49.720 | like, oh my God, close calls,

00:51:52.440 | how, thank God this happened type scenarios.

00:51:56.360 | One was described to me

00:51:58.560 | with an actual personal participant.

00:52:01.640 | Secretary, former Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, right?

00:52:05.640 | And he described what happened to him in 1979.

00:52:09.160 | He was not yet Secretary of Defense.

00:52:10.720 | He was the Deputy Director of Research and Engineering,

00:52:13.880 | which is like a big job at the Pentagon.

00:52:15.820 | And it was, the night watch fell on him essentially, right?

00:52:19.760 | And he gets this call in the middle of the night.

00:52:22.160 | He's told that Russia has launched not just ICBMs,

00:52:27.160 | but submarine-launched ballistic missiles

00:52:30.220 | are coming at the United States.

00:52:32.000 | And he is about to notify the president

00:52:35.280 | that the six minute window has to begin.

00:52:37.440 | When he learns it was a mistake.

00:52:41.360 | The mistake was that there was a training tape

00:52:44.480 | with a nuclear war scenario, right?

00:52:47.800 | We haven't even begun to talk about the nuclear war scenarios

00:52:50.560 | that the Pentagon runs.

00:52:51.680 | An actual VHS training tape had been incorrectly inserted

00:52:57.600 | into a system at the Pentagon.

00:53:00.420 | And so this nuclear launch showed up

00:53:05.340 | at that bunker beneath the Pentagon

00:53:07.340 | and at the bunker beneath STRATCOM,

00:53:09.940 | because they're connected, as being real.

00:53:13.300 | And then it was like, oh, whoops,

00:53:14.880 | it's actually a simulation test tape.

00:53:17.620 | And Perry described to me what that was like,

00:53:21.720 | the pause in his spirit and his mind and his heart

00:53:25.940 | when he realized, I'm about to have to tell the president

00:53:28.940 | that he needs to launch nuclear weapons.

00:53:30.500 | And he learned just in the neck of time

00:53:32.260 | that it was an error.

00:53:33.780 | And that's one of five examples.

00:53:36.020 | - Can you speak to maybe, is there any more color

00:53:39.540 | to the feelings he was feeling?

00:53:41.620 | Like, what's your sense?

00:53:43.380 | And given all the experts you've talked to,

00:53:45.860 | what can be said about the seconds that one feels

00:53:53.540 | once finding out that a launch has happened,

00:53:56.900 | even if that information is false information?

00:54:00.060 | - For me personally, that's the only firsthand story

00:54:02.780 | that I ever heard, because it's so rare and it's so unique.

00:54:05.940 | And most people in the national security system,

00:54:10.340 | at least in the past, have been loath

00:54:13.340 | to talk about any of this, right?

00:54:15.060 | It's like the sacred oath, it's taboo.

00:54:18.300 | It's taboo to go against the system of systems

00:54:22.680 | that is making sure nuclear war never happens.

00:54:26.380 | Bill Perry was one of the first people who did this.

00:54:30.340 | And a lot of it, I believe,

00:54:32.660 | at least in my lengthy conversations with him,

00:54:36.140 | we had a lot of Zoom calls over COVID

00:54:38.700 | when I began reporting this.

00:54:40.020 | And he had a lot to do with me feeling

00:54:43.580 | like I could write this book from a human point of view

00:54:48.020 | and not just from the mechanized systems.

00:54:51.000 | Because, and I only lightly touch upon this

00:54:53.700 | because it's such a fast sweeping scenario,

00:54:56.100 | but Perry, for example, spent his whole life

00:54:59.380 | dedicated to building weapons of war,

00:55:02.220 | only later in life to realize this is madness.

00:55:06.980 | And he shared with me that it was that idea

00:55:11.900 | about one's grandchildren inheriting these nuclear arsenals

00:55:18.260 | and the lack of wisdom

00:55:23.060 | that comes with their origin stories, right?

00:55:27.540 | When you're involved in it in the ground up,

00:55:30.060 | apparently it has,

00:55:32.740 | perhaps you're a different kind of steward

00:55:35.980 | of these systems than if you just inherit them

00:55:40.460 | and they are pages in a manual.

00:55:44.100 | - People forget.

00:55:46.820 | You mentioned the kind of nuclear war scenarios

00:55:49.660 | that the Pentagon runs.

00:55:51.220 | I'd love to, what do you know about those?

00:55:53.540 | - I mean, again, they are very classified, right?

00:55:56.460 | I mean, it was interesting coming across levels

00:56:00.260 | of classification I didn't even know existed,

00:56:02.100 | like ECI, for example,

00:56:04.140 | is exceptionally controlled information, right?

00:56:08.100 | But the Pentagon nuclear war gaming scenarios,

00:56:13.300 | they're almost all still classified.

00:56:15.300 | One of them was declassified recently,

00:56:17.980 | if you can call it that.

00:56:19.820 | I show an image of it in the book

00:56:21.620 | and it's just basically like almost entirely redacted

00:56:26.620 | and then like there'll be a date,

00:56:28.740 | or it'll say like phase one.

00:56:31.420 | And that one was called Proud Prophet.

00:56:33.900 | But what was incredible

00:56:35.140 | about the declassification process of that

00:56:37.540 | is it allowed a couple of people

00:56:39.500 | who were there to talk about it, okay?

00:56:41.660 | And that's why we have that information.

00:56:43.940 | And I write about Proud Prophet in the book

00:56:45.780 | because it was super significant in many ways.

00:56:48.700 | One, it was happening right,

00:56:51.300 | in 1983, it was an insane moment in nuclear arsenals.

00:56:56.300 | There were 60,000 nuclear weapons.

00:57:00.420 | Right now there's 12,500.

00:57:02.100 | So we've come a long way, baby, right?

00:57:04.300 | In terms of disarmament, but there were 60,000.

00:57:06.900 | And by the way, that was not the ultimate high.

00:57:08.900 | The ultimate high was 70,000, okay?

00:57:12.260 | This is insane.

00:57:13.860 | And Ronald Reagan was president

00:57:16.020 | and he orders this war game called Proud Prophet.

00:57:19.300 | And everyone that mattered was involved.

00:57:24.060 | They were running the war game scenarios.

00:57:25.700 | And what we learned from his declassification

00:57:28.620 | is that no matter how nuclear war starts,

00:57:31.620 | there was a bunch of different scenarios

00:57:33.020 | with NATO involved, without NATO,

00:57:35.580 | with all different scenarios,

00:57:37.620 | no matter how nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon.

00:57:43.540 | It ends with everyone dead.

00:57:45.780 | I mean, this is shocking when you think about

00:57:50.940 | that coupled with the idea that all that has been done

00:57:55.540 | in the 40 some odd years since is,

00:57:58.180 | okay, let's just really lean in even harder

00:58:01.980 | to this theoretical phenomena of deterrence.

00:58:06.620 | 'Cause that's all it is.

00:58:07.620 | It's just a statement, Lex.

00:58:09.940 | Like deterrence will hold.

00:58:13.140 | Okay, well, what if it doesn't?

00:58:15.540 | Well, we know from Proud Prophet what happens if it doesn't.

00:58:20.300 | - That almost always, there's no mechanisms

00:58:23.180 | in the human mind and the human soul that stops it

00:58:26.340 | in the governments they've created.

00:58:28.940 | It just keep, the procedure escalates always.

00:58:31.420 | - I mean, here's a crazy nomenclature jargon thing

00:58:34.740 | for you, ready?

00:58:35.980 | Escalate to deescalate.

00:58:37.900 | That's what comes out of it.

00:58:39.500 | Think about what I just said.

00:58:41.100 | Escalate to deescalate.

00:58:42.860 | Okay, so someone strikes you with a nuclear weapon,

00:58:45.540 | you're gonna escalate it, right?

00:58:47.540 | General Hyten recently said, he was STRATCOM commander,

00:58:50.260 | you know, he was sort of saber rattling

00:58:53.460 | with North Korea during COVID and he said,

00:58:55.300 | "They need to know if they launch one nuclear weapon,

00:58:58.300 | "we launch one.

00:58:59.220 | "If they launch two, we launch two."

00:59:01.900 | But it's actually more than that.

00:59:03.260 | They launch one, we launch 80, okay?

00:59:06.460 | That's called escalate to deescalate.

00:59:09.260 | Like pound the you know what out of them

00:59:12.180 | to get them to stop.

00:59:13.580 | - But I mean, there is, to make a case for that,

00:59:19.620 | there is a reason to the madness

00:59:23.540 | because you want to threaten this gigantic response.

00:59:28.540 | But when it comes to it, the seconds before,

00:59:32.260 | there is still a probability that you'll pull back.

00:59:36.660 | - Which brings us to the most terrifying facts

00:59:40.380 | that I learned in all of that.

00:59:41.980 | And that has to do with errors, right?

00:59:46.460 | Not just, not errors of like we spoke about a minute ago

00:59:49.180 | with, you know, a simulation test tape.

00:59:51.140 | I'm talking about if one madman, one nihilistic madman

00:59:56.140 | were to launch a nuclear weapon, as I write in the scenario.

00:59:59.580 | And we needed to escalate to deescalate.

01:00:03.380 | We needed to send nuclear weapons

01:00:05.020 | at let's say North Korea, as I do in my scenario.

01:00:08.340 | Well, what is completely unknown to 98% of the planet

01:00:13.220 | is that not only do the Russians

01:00:18.220 | have a very flawed satellite system

01:00:21.100 | so that they cannot interpret what is happening properly,

01:00:24.060 | but there is a absolutely existential flaw in the system,

01:00:28.820 | which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me,

01:00:33.180 | which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range.

01:00:38.180 | If we launch a counter-attack against say North Korea,

01:00:43.700 | our ICBMs must fly over Russia.

01:00:47.720 | They must fly over Russia.

01:00:51.760 | So imagine saying, oh no, no, these 82, you know,

01:00:56.340 | warheads that are gonna actually strike

01:01:00.020 | the Northern Korean Peninsula are not coming for you, Russia,

01:01:04.260 | our adversary right now

01:01:05.500 | that we're sort of saber-rattling with, just trust us.

01:01:08.640 | And that is where nuclear war unfolds into Armageddon.

01:01:14.100 | And that hole in national security is shocking.

01:01:18.420 | And as Panetta told me, no one wants to discuss it.

01:01:21.240 | - And if one nuclear weapon does reach its target,

01:01:27.420 | I presume communication breaks down completely.

01:01:32.420 | Or like there's a high risk of breakdown of communication.

01:01:36.100 | - Well, let's back up.

01:01:37.640 | We are both presumptuous to assume

01:01:40.260 | that communication could even happen prior to,

01:01:42.700 | and let me give you a very specific example.

01:01:45.380 | During the Ukraine war, okay?

01:01:47.760 | If perhaps you remember, I think it was in November of 2022,

01:01:53.580 | news reports erroneously stated that a Russian rocket,

01:01:58.580 | a Russian missile had hit Poland, a NATO country, right?

01:02:02.700 | It turned out to be a mistake, but for several hours,

01:02:05.380 | this was actually the information

01:02:07.340 | that was all over the news, breaking news, okay?

01:02:10.120 | 36 hours later, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

01:02:15.960 | General Mark Milley, gave a press conference

01:02:19.700 | and talked about this and admitted

01:02:21.780 | that he could not reach his Russian counterpart

01:02:25.660 | during those 36 hours.

01:02:27.940 | He could not reach him.

01:02:30.420 | How are you going to not have an absolute

01:02:34.780 | Armageddon-like Fuhrer with nuclear weapons in the air

01:02:40.800 | if people can't get on the phone during a ground war?

01:02:48.580 | I'd like to believe that there's people in major nations

01:02:53.580 | that don't give a damn about the bullshit of politics

01:02:58.940 | and can always just pick up the phone,

01:03:01.580 | sort of very close to the top, but not at the very top,

01:03:05.060 | and just cut through the bullshit of it

01:03:07.940 | in situations like this.

01:03:09.900 | I hope that's true.

01:03:11.020 | I doubt it is, and let me tell you why.

01:03:13.260 | Most, and neither you nor I are political

01:03:16.420 | from what I gather, right?

01:03:17.420 | So I just write about POTUS,

01:03:19.500 | President of the United States.

01:03:21.580 | You have no idea what my politics are

01:03:25.100 | because they shouldn't matter.

01:03:26.180 | No one should be for nuclear war,

01:03:28.620 | or no one should be for national insecurity.

01:03:32.100 | Yes, you want to have a strong nation,

01:03:34.260 | but once you get into politics,

01:03:36.460 | then you're talking about sycophants.

01:03:38.260 | And the more a political leader becomes divisive,

01:03:43.580 | becomes polemic, the more his platform is predicated

01:03:48.340 | on hating the other side,

01:03:49.820 | either within his own country

01:03:51.580 | or with alleged enemy nations,

01:03:55.660 | the more you surround yourself,

01:03:57.620 | as we see in the current day, with sycophants,

01:04:00.340 | with people who will tell you

01:04:02.060 | not only what they think you want to hear,

01:04:04.940 | but will help them to hold onto power.

01:04:08.540 | So you don't have wise decision-makers.

01:04:10.820 | Long gone are the days where we had presidents

01:04:13.660 | who had advisors on both sides of the aisle.

01:04:18.660 | That's really important

01:04:21.340 | because you want to have differing opinions.

01:04:25.180 | But as things become more viperous,

01:04:29.220 | both here in the United States

01:04:31.860 | and in nuclear-armed nations,

01:04:34.580 | all bets are off at whether your advisors

01:04:36.700 | are going to give you good advice.

01:04:38.340 | - Who are the people around the President

01:04:39.980 | of the United States

01:04:41.260 | that give advice in this six-minute window?

01:04:44.380 | How many of them,

01:04:46.100 | just maybe you could speak to the detail of that,

01:04:48.500 | but also to the spirit of the way they see the world,

01:04:52.100 | how many of them are warmongers?

01:04:53.660 | How many of them are kind of big picture,

01:04:56.660 | peace, humanity type of thinkers?

01:04:59.380 | - Well, again, we're talking about that six-minute window.

01:05:01.580 | So it's not exactly like you can,

01:05:03.740 | let me put a pot of coffee on

01:05:05.420 | and really tell me what you think,

01:05:06.540 | and we can strategize here, right?

01:05:07.900 | You have your SECDEF and your chairman,

01:05:10.420 | maybe the vice chairman.

01:05:12.220 | And okay, we haven't even begun to talk about the fact

01:05:15.140 | that at the same time,

01:05:16.100 | these advisors also have a parallel concern,

01:05:20.420 | and that's called continuity of government, okay?

01:05:23.260 | So while they're trying to advise

01:05:24.980 | on the nuclear counter-strike

01:05:27.660 | in response to the incoming nuclear missile,

01:05:30.540 | they have to be thinking,

01:05:32.420 | how are we going to keep the government functioning

01:05:35.020 | when the missiles start hitting,

01:05:38.260 | when the bombs start going off?

01:05:39.860 | And that is about getting yourself out of the Pentagon,

01:05:44.860 | let's say,

01:05:45.740 | getting yourself to one of these nuclear bunkers

01:05:48.540 | that I write about at length in the book.

01:05:50.420 | So how much can you ask of a human, right?

01:05:53.460 | 'Cause it comes down to a human.

01:05:54.660 | The secretary of defense is a human.

01:05:56.780 | And imagine that job while trying to advise the president.

01:06:01.900 | And then there's also a really interesting term,

01:06:04.420 | which I learned about called jamming the president,

01:06:07.500 | which is often understood in Washington

01:06:09.780 | that the military advisors would,

01:06:12.380 | we don't know if this is legit,

01:06:13.740 | we've never seen it put to the test,

01:06:15.460 | but jamming the president means the military advisors

01:06:18.940 | are gonna push for a really aggressive

01:06:22.700 | counter-attack immediately.

01:06:24.620 | And again, you're the president

01:06:27.980 | who's not really been paying attention to this

01:06:30.140 | because he has many other things to deal with.

01:06:33.060 | Speed is not conducive to wisdom.

01:06:36.700 | - Can you speak to the jamming the president?

01:06:38.220 | So your sense is the advisors would, by default,

01:06:43.220 | be pushing for aggressive counter-attack.

01:06:46.300 | - That is a term in sort of the national security,

01:06:49.980 | nuclear command and control, historical documentation,

01:06:54.580 | that many of the people that you might call

01:06:56.500 | the more dovish type people are worried about,

01:07:01.460 | that the more hawkish people are going to,

01:07:05.820 | the military advisors, right,

01:07:07.660 | are gonna be jamming the president

01:07:09.740 | to make these decisions about which targets,

01:07:13.300 | not if, but what. - Right, which targets.

01:07:15.300 | The argument will be about which targets,

01:07:17.140 | not about if. - Yes, yes.

01:07:19.220 | - I hope that even the warmongers would, at this moment,

01:07:24.220 | because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war?

01:07:30.220 | It's power, it's like wanting to destroy the enemy

01:07:33.500 | and be the big kid on the block.

01:07:35.920 | But with nuclear war, it just feels like that falls apart.

01:07:39.700 | Do you think warmongers actually believe

01:07:42.180 | they can win a nuclear war?

01:07:43.640 | - Well, you've raised a really important question

01:07:46.840 | that we look to the historical record for that answer, right?

01:07:49.960 | Because astonishingly, all of this began,

01:07:54.260 | like when Russia first got the bomb in 1949,

01:08:00.260 | the powers that be, and I write about them in the book

01:08:03.500 | as in a setup for the moment of launch, right?

01:08:07.420 | Like it's called how we got here, right?

01:08:10.300 | And you see, and I cite declassified documents

01:08:14.620 | from some of these early meetings

01:08:18.820 | where nuclear war plans were being laid out.

01:08:22.420 | And absolutely, back in the 1950s,

01:08:25.420 | the generals and the admirals that were running

01:08:27.860 | the nuclear command and control system

01:08:29.620 | believed that we could fight and win a nuclear war

01:08:34.620 | despite hundreds of millions of people dying.

01:08:37.820 | This was the prevailing thought.

01:08:40.820 | And only over time did the kind of concept come into play

01:08:45.820 | that no, we can never have a nuclear war.

01:08:51.300 | It's the famous Gorbachev and Reagan joint statement.

01:08:55.780 | A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

01:09:00.060 | But before that, many people believed that it could be won

01:09:05.060 | and they were preparing for that.

01:09:07.540 | - Not to be political and not to be ageist,

01:09:11.420 | but do cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff

01:09:15.660 | come into play here?

01:09:17.060 | So if so much is riding on the president,

01:09:19.540 | is there tests that are conducted?

01:09:24.100 | Is there regular training procedures on the president

01:09:27.260 | that you're aware of?

01:09:28.300 | Do you know?

01:09:29.940 | - I don't think that has anything to do with ageism.

01:09:32.300 | I think it has to do with,

01:09:33.540 | I think it's an earnest question, a really powerful one.

01:09:37.340 | And if people were to ask that question of themselves

01:09:41.380 | or their sort of dinner party guests

01:09:44.580 | or their family around the dinner table guests,

01:09:47.340 | you might come to a real good conclusion

01:09:49.180 | about how bad our political system is

01:09:51.100 | and how bad our presidential candidates are.

01:09:53.420 | Because why on earth there would be two candidates,

01:09:56.980 | one of whom has cognitive problems

01:09:58.900 | and the other of whom has judgment problems.

01:10:02.100 | These are the two biggest issues with a nuclear launch,

01:10:06.060 | judgment and cognition.

01:10:07.820 | And so where's the young-ish,

01:10:12.100 | thoughtful, forward-looking,

01:10:16.980 | wise, dedicated, civil servant?

01:10:23.940 | Running for president.

01:10:24.980 | I know that sounds, you know,

01:10:27.860 | fantastical, but I wish it weren't.

01:10:32.180 | - So that's one of the things that you really think about

01:10:34.540 | when voting for president,

01:10:36.660 | is this scenario that we've been describing,

01:10:39.940 | these six minutes.

01:10:41.820 | Imagine the man or woman sitting there six minutes

01:10:44.900 | waiting for the pot of coffee.

01:10:46.420 | - But I think about that issue

01:10:49.580 | with any war, right?

01:10:53.820 | I mean, prior to writing "Nuclear War Scenario,"

01:10:57.780 | I previously wrote six books

01:11:01.380 | on military and intelligence programs

01:11:06.300 | designed to prevent nuclear war.

01:11:08.820 | And I believe the president as commander-in-chief

01:11:12.780 | should be of the highest character possible

01:11:18.180 | because the programs, the wars that we have fought

01:11:22.660 | since World War II have all been,

01:11:24.980 | you know, how many octogenarian sources have I interviewed?

01:11:28.380 | I'm talking about Nobel Laureates and weapons designer

01:11:31.780 | and spy pilots and engineers in general.

01:11:35.180 | They've all said to me with great pride, you know,

01:11:38.860 | we prevented World War III, nuclear World War III, right?

01:11:43.660 | But that idea that the commander-in-chief

01:11:45.620 | and everyone within the national security apparatus

01:11:49.820 | should be making really good decisions about war,

01:11:53.300 | it's the oldest cliche in the world that, you know,

01:11:55.660 | the wars are fought by the young kids.

01:11:58.300 | And that is, it's not a cliche, it's true.

01:12:01.740 | And so the character part about the president

01:12:04.100 | should be in play, whether we're thinking about nuclear war

01:12:08.140 | or any war, in my opinion.

01:12:10.140 | - Well, I agree with you, first of all,

01:12:14.340 | but it feels like when nuclear war,

01:12:17.700 | one person becomes like exponentially more important.

01:12:21.860 | With a regular war, the decision to go to war or not,

01:12:25.220 | advisors start mattering more, there's judgment issues.

01:12:30.820 | You can start to make arguments for sort of more leeway

01:12:35.820 | in terms of what kind of people we elect.

01:12:39.420 | It seems like with nuclear war, there's no leeway.

01:12:41.340 | It's like one person can resist this,

01:12:45.660 | the jamming the president force, the warmongers,

01:12:50.300 | the use, like all the calculation involved

01:12:55.220 | in considering what are the errors, the mistakes,

01:12:57.220 | the missiles flying over Russia,

01:12:59.500 | the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world.

01:13:03.460 | Consider all of humanity, the history of humanity,

01:13:06.300 | the future of humanity, your loved,

01:13:09.340 | all of it just loaded in to make a decision.

01:13:12.700 | Then it becomes much more important

01:13:14.420 | that your cognitive abilities are strong

01:13:17.660 | and your judgment abilities against powerful, wise people,

01:13:22.660 | just as a human being are strong.

01:13:27.580 | So I think that's something to really, really consider

01:13:30.700 | when you vote for president.

01:13:32.220 | But to which degree is it really on the president

01:13:35.740 | versus to the people advising?

01:13:37.700 | Oh no, it's on the president.

01:13:39.580 | The president has to make the call.

01:13:40.940 | And that six minute window happens so fast.

01:13:44.100 | I mean, the president is gonna be being moved

01:13:47.300 | for part of that time.

01:13:48.220 | The secret service is gonna be up against STRATCOM,

01:13:52.380 | STRATCOM saying, "We need the launch orders."

01:13:54.980 | And the secret service is gonna be saying,

01:13:56.540 | "We need to move the president."

01:13:58.360 | So it's not as much that he's delegating the issues,

01:14:01.180 | it's more like the issue is being postponed

01:14:03.700 | because there is only one issue,

01:14:05.580 | for the president to say these targets,

01:14:08.040 | for him to choose from the Denny's like menu,

01:14:11.620 | "Okay, this is what we're gonna go with."

01:14:13.100 | And then this astonishing thing happens.

01:14:15.940 | The president takes out his wallet.

01:14:19.020 | He has a card in it that's colloquially called the biscuit.

01:14:22.500 | And that card with the codes matches up an item

01:14:25.900 | in the briefcase, in the football,

01:14:30.060 | that then is received by an officer

01:14:33.580 | underneath the Pentagon in that bunker.

01:14:37.180 | It's a call and response Lex.

01:14:39.380 | It's like, you know, alpha zeta, right?

01:14:42.140 | That's it.

01:14:43.100 | And then back so that the individual in the bunker realizes

01:14:48.100 | they are getting the command from the president.

01:14:53.920 | And then that order is passed to STRATCOM.

01:14:58.240 | And STRATCOM, the commander of STRATCOM,

01:15:03.300 | and I interviewed a former commander of STRATCOM.

01:15:06.660 | Commander of STRATCOM then follows orders,

01:15:10.420 | which is he delivers the launch orders to the nuclear triad.

01:15:15.420 | And what's done is done.

01:15:18.740 | - What would you do if you were the commander of STRATCOM

01:15:21.940 | in that situation?

01:15:22.940 | What would you do?

01:15:23.780 | 'Cause I think my gut reaction right now,

01:15:25.500 | if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders.

01:15:28.180 | - Okay, so good question.

01:15:30.980 | I asked that exact question to one of my

01:15:35.460 | very helpful sources on the book, Dr. Glenn McDuff,

01:15:39.620 | who is at Los Alamos and who for a while was the classified,

01:15:44.620 | they have a museum that's classified within the lab.

01:15:49.260 | And he was the historian in charge of it, right?

01:15:51.420 | So he's a nuclear weapons engineer.

01:15:52.740 | He worked on Star Wars during the Reagan era.

01:15:54.740 | And he does a lot having to do

01:15:56.640 | with the history of Los Alamos.

01:15:58.500 | And the, by the way, the Oppenheimer movie really,

01:16:03.500 | 'cause I've reported on nuclear weapons for 12 years now.

01:16:07.940 | And Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me,

01:16:11.740 | positive impact on Los Alamos's transparency

01:16:16.140 | with people like me.

01:16:17.620 | They had a real willingness to share information.

01:16:20.540 | I think before perhaps they were on their heels

01:16:23.100 | feeling they needed to be on the defensive,

01:16:26.220 | but now they're much more forthcoming.

01:16:28.040 | They were super helpful.

01:16:30.060 | I can tell you the origin story of the football,

01:16:31.900 | which they declassified for the book.

01:16:34.260 | But I asked this question to Dr. Glenn McDuff, right?

01:16:37.180 | Like in a different manner, I said,

01:16:39.980 | "Is there a chance that the STRATCOM commander

01:16:44.380 | "would defy orders?"

01:16:47.660 | And he said, "Annie, you have a better chance

01:16:51.700 | "winning Powerball."

01:16:53.040 | Why do you think, what's his intuition behind that?

01:16:58.080 | You don't wind up a STRATCOM commander

01:17:00.880 | unless you are someone who follows orders.

01:17:03.820 | You follow orders.

01:17:07.960 | - You don't think there's a deep humanity there?

01:17:10.760 | Because his intuition is about everything we know so far,

01:17:14.880 | but this situation has never happened

01:17:17.120 | in the history of Earth.

01:17:18.300 | - Well, this is true.

01:17:19.140 | And all right, so you're raising a really tricky,

01:17:20.880 | interesting conundrum here.

01:17:22.720 | Because during COVID, when President Trump

01:17:27.260 | and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked

01:17:30.960 | in various relationships with one another,

01:17:35.180 | good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly,

01:17:38.300 | just bananas, you might say, like not presidential behavior.

01:17:42.700 | If you were someone watching C-SPAN, like I do,

01:17:47.300 | nerding out on what STRATCOM was actually saying

01:17:50.980 | about all this, you noticed that STRATCOM commanders

01:17:55.600 | were speaking out publicly to Congress

01:18:00.000 | more so than I had ever seen before.

01:18:03.160 | And this issue came up, would you defy presidential order?

01:18:07.280 | So the caveat, I would say, to McDuff's answer

01:18:10.440 | of easier to win the Powerball, right,

01:18:13.040 | is that if the commander of STRATCOM

01:18:21.060 | interpreted the president's behavior to be unreliable,

01:18:26.060 | to be non-presidential, then dot, dot, dot.

01:18:32.940 | But now you're into some really radical territory.

01:18:39.900 | - Well, I mean, fundamentally,

01:18:44.580 | it feels like just looking at all the presidents

01:18:48.820 | of the United States in my lifetime,

01:18:51.300 | it feels like none of them are qualified

01:18:53.700 | for the six minutes.

01:18:55.400 | So I could see as being the commander of STRATCOM,

01:19:00.400 | being like, this guy, basically respecting no president.

01:19:06.180 | I know you're supposed to be commander-in-chief,

01:19:08.740 | but in this situation, saying, I mean, everybody,

01:19:12.820 | Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, if I was a commander-in-chief,

01:19:18.380 | commander of STRATCOM, I'd be like,

01:19:20.020 | what does this guy know about any of this?

01:19:22.180 | I would defy orders.

01:19:25.920 | I mean, in this situation,

01:19:27.140 | when the future of human civilization hangs in the balance,

01:19:31.860 | I mean, to be the person that says yes, launch,

01:19:36.860 | no matter what, I just can't see a human being on Earth

01:19:41.980 | being able to do that in the United States of America.

01:19:45.400 | That's a hell of a decision.

01:19:47.420 | Like, this is it, that's it.

01:19:49.660 | - Well, but now you've raised a great, important,

01:19:52.360 | presentation essentially,

01:19:55.580 | because what you're saying is people be aware, right?

01:19:58.860 | Be aware of like why you're voting

01:20:01.100 | or why certain individuals are being escalated

01:20:04.660 | to even being able to run for president.

01:20:07.380 | What does that mean?

01:20:08.300 | Why are people in America not more involved as citizens?

01:20:10.940 | Do we have a responsibility for that?

01:20:12.620 | Because you've opened up the door for people to understand,

01:20:15.540 | okay, the ultimate thing is the nuclear launch decision.

01:20:19.220 | So, if a person can't be trusted with that,

01:20:21.960 | you know, everything unravels from there.

01:20:26.300 | - Also, I want to look up

01:20:27.220 | who's the commander of STRATCOM now.

01:20:29.020 | Speaking of which,

01:20:33.100 | you've interviewed a lot of experts for this book.

01:20:35.820 | Is there some commonalities about the way,

01:20:40.820 | you've talked about this a little bit,

01:20:42.980 | but in the way they see this whole situation,

01:20:45.380 | what like scares them the most about this whole system

01:20:50.380 | and the whole possibility of nuclear war?

01:20:54.340 | - I first learned about nuclear weapons

01:20:57.300 | from a guy called Al O'Donnell,

01:21:00.220 | who appears in my earlier books,

01:21:02.660 | because I interviewed him

01:21:04.960 | for over a period of four and a half years,

01:21:06.780 | because he was an engineer

01:21:09.660 | who actually wired nuclear bombs in the 1950s.

01:21:13.420 | He was a member of the Manhattan Project in 1946,

01:21:16.780 | worked on Operation Crossroads,

01:21:19.020 | the first explosions of nuclear bombs after the war ended,

01:21:24.020 | after World War II ended,

01:21:25.380 | and went on to arm, wire, and fire

01:21:29.900 | 186 out of the 200-some-odd atmospheric nuclear tests

01:21:34.900 | that the United States did before this was banned.

01:21:39.060 | And so I learned from him the power of these weapons, right?

01:21:44.060 | And I learned from him this very almost nationalistic idea

01:21:49.540 | about how important it was to have nuclear weapons.

01:21:53.780 | And while I learned a lot about his human side,

01:21:55.960 | I also saw the side of him

01:21:58.540 | that was very Cold War warrior, right?

01:22:01.940 | And then, so he was kind of the first,

01:22:04.200 | and then, I don't know, there've been a hundred people

01:22:06.540 | that have been directly involved in nuclear weapons

01:22:09.460 | along the way, Billy Waugh,

01:22:10.940 | who was my subject of my main sort of central figure

01:22:15.900 | in a book I wrote about the CIA's paramilitary

01:22:18.580 | called "Surprise, Kill, Vanish."

01:22:21.300 | And Waugh halo-jumped a tactical nuclear weapon

01:22:26.300 | into the Nevada test site with a small team,

01:22:30.280 | almost unknown to anyone, right?

01:22:32.500 | Only recently declassified.

01:22:34.260 | And so his position was like,

01:22:36.220 | tactical nuclear weapons may end up being used.

01:22:40.380 | So I'm trying to speak here to the scope

01:22:44.340 | of different people I have interviewed over the years,

01:22:48.180 | right?

01:22:49.140 | And what has happened is as I've gotten closer

01:22:52.700 | to the present day, you know, in arrears,

01:22:55.660 | there seems to be a growing movement

01:22:59.220 | from some of these Cold Warriors

01:23:01.140 | off the position of nuclear weapons make us great

01:23:05.940 | and strong toward something must be done

01:23:10.940 | to reduce this threat.

01:23:16.620 | - How much do you know in the same way

01:23:22.860 | that you know about the United States?

01:23:24.600 | How much do you know about the Russian side?

01:23:26.580 | Maybe the Chinese side, India and Pakistan,

01:23:31.020 | that all of this, like what,

01:23:33.140 | how their thinking differs perhaps?

01:23:35.220 | - Yes, well, for that, you wanna go to the experts, right?

01:23:38.140 | So in, for Russia, for example,

01:23:41.140 | there's a guy called Pavel Podvig,

01:23:44.860 | who is probably the West's top expert

01:23:49.700 | on Russian nuclear forces.

01:23:53.180 | He works in parallel with the UN.

01:23:55.860 | He also studied in Moscow and he interviewed,

01:23:59.160 | so my information comes from him, right?

01:24:01.240 | Like you do all the footwork to know what questions to ask,

01:24:04.960 | and then you take the very specific questions to him.

01:24:08.500 | And I learned from him about how the Russian command

01:24:12.280 | and control goes down.

01:24:13.760 | And it's very similar to ours because America and Russia

01:24:18.760 | have been at sort of nuclear dueling with one another

01:24:22.320 | for 75 years now.

01:24:24.740 | And so everything we have, they have, right?

01:24:27.500 | With the exception of we have a great satellite system

01:24:30.800 | and they have a super flawed one.

01:24:32.080 | Theirs is called Tundra.

01:24:33.140 | And even Pavel Podvig admitted

01:24:36.720 | that there are serious flaws in Tundra.

01:24:39.280 | The Russian satellite system, for example,

01:24:41.980 | can mistake sunlight for flames,

01:24:45.200 | can mistake clouds for a nuclear launch.

01:24:48.440 | This is a fact, okay?

01:24:50.600 | And what was interesting in interviewing him

01:24:54.760 | was also this recent very, very dangerous shift

01:24:59.600 | in Russian nuclear policy, which is this.

01:25:02.480 | Many Russian experts will tell you

01:25:05.660 | that Russia has always maintained

01:25:07.440 | that it never had a launch on warning policy.

01:25:10.280 | Now, I don't know if I believe that's true,

01:25:12.540 | but I'm just telling you what they say.

01:25:14.280 | And this is coming from the generals,

01:25:16.360 | the Cold War generals in Soviet Russia saying,

01:25:18.840 | "Oh, no, no, no, we would wait."

01:25:20.720 | They were kind of playing the noble warrior.

01:25:22.800 | "We would wait to absorb a nuclear attack

01:25:26.640 | "until we launched, okay?"

01:25:28.600 | So many Americans, experts will tell you

01:25:31.040 | that that's just posturing and propaganda.

01:25:33.560 | But that was their official position.

01:25:35.040 | And that changed just two years ago

01:25:37.860 | when Putin gave a speech.

01:25:40.040 | And he said that their position had changed,

01:25:43.920 | that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack,

01:25:46.280 | that once they learn of, how did he phrase it?

01:25:50.600 | He called it like the trajectory of the missiles, right?

01:25:54.160 | Which is a way of sort of talking about parody,

01:25:56.880 | the same way we see the missile coming over in mid-course.

01:26:00.360 | Putin made that same statement and said we would launch.

01:26:04.320 | - What do you know of the way Putin thinks

01:26:06.040 | about nuclear weapons and nuclear war?

01:26:09.640 | Is it just something to allude to in a speech?

01:26:13.800 | Or do you think he contemplates

01:26:15.320 | the possibilities of nuclear war?

01:26:17.020 | - I don't know, but if I had to guess,

01:26:20.140 | it would go like this.

01:26:21.080 | I would look at his background,

01:26:22.560 | and he comes from the intelligence world, right?

01:26:25.200 | So my experience in interviewing old timers

01:26:29.360 | who've spent decades working for the CIA,

01:26:31.840 | or even NRO, or NSA, I know the way they think

01:26:36.360 | from having spent hundreds of hours interviewing them.

01:26:39.160 | And then I know the way that military men think,

01:26:44.160 | and it's very different, right?

01:26:47.040 | So Putin's not a military person per se.

01:26:50.380 | He's an intelligence officer.

01:26:52.440 | So what would concern me there,

01:26:54.820 | if I had to guess about his mindset,

01:26:56.980 | has to do with paranoia, right?

01:26:59.140 | Most intelligence officers must have a degree

01:27:03.900 | of healthy paranoia, or they're gonna wind up dead, right?

01:27:08.620 | And so that's not a great quality to have.

01:27:11.740 | - You would be more trigger-happy, perhaps.

01:27:14.380 | So you would be more prone to respond to erroneous signals.

01:27:19.380 | - And you'd be suspicious, and you can see that now.

01:27:22.380 | There's such a, you know, incredible distrust,

01:27:27.380 | and sort of real conflict between Russia,

01:27:33.040 | between its leader and NATO,

01:27:39.600 | between its leader and all of the West.

01:27:42.480 | And then that is fueled by his closest advisors.

01:27:47.280 | Kind of, you know, they seem to be,

01:27:52.680 | from the statements they have made

01:27:54.400 | that I've read in translation,

01:27:56.080 | they seem to be fostering that same idea,

01:27:58.460 | that, you know, NATO really has it in for Russia.

01:28:03.300 | America really has it in.

01:28:05.840 | And that is so dangerous and disheartening.

01:28:09.760 | - And perhaps makes it less likely

01:28:11.160 | that the president would pick up the phone

01:28:14.080 | and talk to the other president.

01:28:15.680 | - And/or that the close advisors

01:28:18.120 | near the president would make that happen.

01:28:20.420 | - You were talking about the procedure with the football.

01:28:24.200 | Is there any concern for cyber attacks,

01:28:27.480 | for sort of security concerns of, at every level here,

01:28:32.480 | false signals, errors, shutting down

01:28:37.480 | the channels of communication through cyber attacks,

01:28:40.160 | all that kind of stuff?

01:28:41.600 | - So to answer those questions,

01:28:43.920 | I interviewed a number of people,

01:28:45.440 | but most specifically General Tuhill,

01:28:48.800 | who was Obama's cyber chief.

01:28:52.160 | And he was actually America's first cyber chief.

01:28:56.280 | And the nuclear command and control system,

01:29:01.280 | and really the triad, functions on analog systems.

01:29:06.400 | It functions on old school systems

01:29:09.720 | if there's not digital interface,

01:29:12.200 | you can't hack into it, right?

01:29:14.160 | So most of the issues that I raise in the book

01:29:17.880 | have to do with what happens to cyber

01:29:22.880 | after a nuclear attack, right?

01:29:25.320 | What happens to cyber in the minutes after a bomb,

01:29:29.760 | a nuclear weapon strikes America,

01:29:33.080 | and how that impacts the ability

01:29:36.880 | for people to communicate with one another.

01:29:38.880 | And that's when chaos takes control.

01:29:42.700 | - Well, let's talk about it.

01:29:46.080 | So, God forbid, if a nuclear weapon reaches its target,

01:29:51.080 | what happens?

01:29:54.900 | What, perhaps you could say,

01:29:58.400 | what you think would be the first target hit,

01:30:01.240 | would it be the Pentagon?

01:30:02.480 | - I was told by many people I interviewed

01:30:07.000 | that the biggest fear in Washington, D.C.

01:30:09.720 | is what's called a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack.

01:30:12.480 | That's an unwarned nuclear attack against Washington, D.C.

01:30:16.360 | The target would be the Pentagon.

01:30:17.920 | And that's what I begin the scenario with, you know?

01:30:20.920 | And I reported in graphic, horrifying detail what happens,

01:30:25.920 | because I don't know what's worse,

01:30:28.680 | me writing that all out,

01:30:30.000 | or the fact that it's all documented

01:30:33.400 | by the Defense Department.

01:30:36.160 | I mean, they have been documenting the effect

01:30:39.000 | of nuclear weapons on people and animals and things

01:30:43.040 | since the earliest days of the Cold War.

01:30:47.040 | And all of the details I pull are from these documents

01:30:51.400 | like the effects of nuclear weapons.

01:30:54.040 | And again, this document was the original information,

01:30:59.160 | the original data in this document

01:31:00.560 | come from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right?

01:31:03.280 | It was all classified.

01:31:04.600 | And then it was built upon

01:31:06.040 | by those 200-some-odd atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

01:31:11.040 | We did.

01:31:12.040 | And, you know, we're talking about like millimeters

01:31:16.320 | and inches, we're talking about the Defense Department

01:31:18.440 | knowing that, oh, seven and a half miles out,

01:31:22.240 | the upholstery on cars will spontaneously combust.

01:31:25.800 | The pine needles will catch on fire.

01:31:27.840 | They will start more fires, you know?

01:31:30.760 | You have all kinds of mayhem and chaos happening

01:31:35.720 | based on reported facts from observations.

01:31:42.760 | And this is really shocking and grotesque at the same time.

01:31:48.040 | - So one warhead reaches the Pentagon,

01:31:53.840 | everybody in the Pentagon perishes.

01:31:57.280 | 180 million degrees.

01:32:00.960 | The fireball on a one megaton nuclear weapon

01:32:05.680 | is 19 football fields of fire.

01:32:09.280 | Think about that.

01:32:10.480 | Nothing remains, nothing remains.

01:32:13.880 | - And there's then a radius where people die immediately.

01:32:18.880 | And then there's people that are dead when found.

01:32:25.280 | - And then there's people that will die slowly.

01:32:28.840 | - Yes. - The centric rings.

01:32:31.200 | - And again, rings defined by defense scientists.

01:32:34.320 | But before that, you know, the bomb goes off.

01:32:36.640 | Then there's this blast wave

01:32:39.000 | that's like several hundred miles an hour

01:32:42.320 | pushing out like a bulldozer, knocking everything down.

01:32:46.920 | Bridges, buildings.

01:32:49.160 | I mean, you can read FEMA manuals

01:32:53.280 | about what the rubble will be like.

01:32:55.200 | You're talking about 30 feet deep rubble

01:32:59.960 | as the buildings go over.

01:33:01.360 | Six, seven, eight, 10 miles out.

01:33:04.080 | That speaks nothing of the megafires that will then ensue.

01:33:09.400 | So once all these people die

01:33:11.280 | and third degree radiation burns,

01:33:13.440 | did you even know there was such a thing

01:33:15.080 | as fourth degree radiation burns, right?

01:33:17.480 | We're talking about the wind ripping the skin

01:33:20.880 | off people's faces many miles out.

01:33:24.960 | And then you have a sucking action, right?

01:33:28.840 | Everyone is, or many people are familiar

01:33:31.360 | with what the nuclear mushroom cloud looks like.

01:33:34.000 | And its stem is actually creates,

01:33:37.360 | and again, this is from physicists

01:33:39.360 | who advise the defense department on this.

01:33:42.240 | The sucking up into the nuclear stem,

01:33:45.840 | 300 mile an hour winds.

01:33:47.960 | You're talking about people miles out

01:33:49.720 | getting sucked up into that stem.

01:33:51.560 | When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex,

01:33:53.800 | that is in a nuclear war, that would be people.

01:33:56.720 | Those are like the remnants of people and of things

01:34:01.440 | in the cloud, 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud

01:34:06.440 | blocking out the sun.

01:34:10.080 | And that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning

01:34:12.840 | that follows.

01:34:14.040 | And then the power grid goes out.

01:34:16.360 | Basically everything we rely on in terms of systems

01:34:22.400 | in our way of life goes out.

01:34:24.520 | You write, quote, "Those who somehow managed

01:34:27.040 | "to escape death by the initial blast, shockwave,

01:34:30.080 | "and firestorm suddenly realize an insidious truth

01:34:33.280 | "about nuclear war, that they're entirely on their own."

01:34:38.280 | Here begins a, quote, "Fight for food and water."

01:34:41.780 | I mean, that is a wake-up call on top of a wake-up call,

01:34:51.240 | that we go back to a kind of primitive fight for survival,

01:34:56.240 | each on their own.

01:34:57.840 | And by the way, those details were given to me

01:35:00.880 | by Obama's FEMA director, Craig Fugate,

01:35:04.360 | who was in charge of, so FEMA is the agency in America

01:35:09.360 | that plans for nuclear war, okay?

01:35:13.000 | And what Fugate said to me was,

01:35:15.080 | "You know, Annie, we plan for asteroid strikes.

01:35:17.400 | "These are called low-probability,

01:35:20.840 | "but high-consequence events."

01:35:23.760 | And FEMA is the organization that, you know,

01:35:27.000 | when there's a hurricane or an earthquake or a flood,

01:35:29.880 | FEMA steps in, and they do what's called

01:35:32.080 | population protection planning, right?

01:35:34.360 | They take care of people.

01:35:35.680 | And what Fugate told me is, after a nuclear strike,

01:35:39.700 | after a bolt out of the blue attack, he used those terms,

01:35:42.920 | there is no population protection.

01:35:45.580 | Everyone's dead, right?

01:35:47.440 | And he means that metaphorically,

01:35:48.720 | but also kind of more literally,

01:35:50.640 | because he just said, at that point,

01:35:53.480 | you just hope that you stalked Pedialyte.

01:35:57.080 | - What do you think happens to humans?

01:36:01.240 | Like, how does human nature manifest itself

01:36:03.920 | in such conditions?

01:36:05.320 | Do you think, like, brutality will come out?

01:36:07.600 | Like, people will, just for survival,

01:36:11.160 | will steal, will murder, will?

01:36:14.840 | - I can't imagine that not happening.

01:36:16.380 | I think that's why people love

01:36:18.380 | post-apocalyptic television shows and films,

01:36:21.140 | because they see that.

01:36:22.140 | And then, of course, there's always

01:36:23.580 | one great charismatic person

01:36:25.820 | who's trying to restore morality.

01:36:27.860 | And these are great narratives that people like

01:36:30.680 | to tell themselves in the world of science fiction.

01:36:33.500 | But what we're dealing with is science fact

01:36:36.020 | in this scenario, and it is meant to terrify people

01:36:41.020 | into realizing, wait a minute,

01:36:43.100 | this is a conversation that absolutely should be have had,

01:36:47.360 | while it can still be had.

01:36:50.920 | Because the reality is,

01:36:52.380 | when you have the director of FEMA telling you this,

01:36:56.360 | it's a real wake-up call.

01:36:57.500 | And by the way, Craig Fugate was so

01:37:00.400 | transparently human with me,

01:37:03.960 | and I quote him directly in the book,

01:37:05.600 | but he spoke about, you asked me earlier about,

01:37:08.720 | like, what would be going through the president's mind,

01:37:10.700 | and we don't know, I don't know.

01:37:12.520 | But Craig Fugate told me

01:37:14.840 | what would be going through his mind.

01:37:16.240 | And he said, along the lines, I'm paraphrasing,

01:37:19.040 | like, it's almost something you couldn't even comprehend.

01:37:23.040 | You would just, it would just, like, ruin you.

01:37:26.680 | You know, his words are really powerful.

01:37:29.520 | And of course, the FEMA director in the scenario

01:37:32.680 | is notified in that first window

01:37:36.000 | while the launch, you know,

01:37:37.440 | while the ballistic missile is on its way,

01:37:39.360 | and no one in America yet knows.

01:37:41.040 | And I have the FEMA director

01:37:42.960 | pull over to the side of the road

01:37:44.200 | and jump in a helicopter that's sent for him

01:37:46.400 | to take him to the bunker that FEMA goes to,

01:37:48.560 | which is called Mount Weather.

01:37:50.080 | And so he's aware that,

01:37:52.360 | Fugate was aware that as FEMA director,

01:37:54.120 | you would likely be taken to a safe place

01:37:57.400 | however many hours you're gonna be safe,

01:38:01.040 | or days, or maybe weeks, or maybe months.

01:38:04.160 | But as I also learned from the cyber people I interviewed,

01:38:07.480 | that, you know, there's a complete fallacy

01:38:10.460 | that these military bases can continue functioning.

01:38:13.360 | They run on diesel fuel.

01:38:15.720 | And when the fuel stops pumping,

01:38:17.860 | there's no more generators.

01:38:19.360 | - Electricity's gone.

01:38:21.900 | Communication lines are all gone.

01:38:28.120 | The food supply, all of it,

01:38:31.360 | all the supply chain is gone.

01:38:33.280 | It's terrifying.

01:38:37.080 | And that's just in the first few days,

01:38:40.780 | first few hours.

01:38:41.980 | In part five,

01:38:45.580 | you described the 24 months and beyond.

01:38:50.020 | After this first hour we've been talking about.

01:38:52.580 | So what happens to Earth?

01:38:54.940 | What happens to humans?

01:38:56.140 | If a full-on nuclear war happens?

01:38:59.640 | - So for that,

01:39:03.340 | I was super privileged to talk to Professor Brian Toon,

01:39:07.520 | who is one of the original five authors

01:39:10.080 | of the nuclear winter theory.

01:39:11.920 | And that theory was developed,

01:39:15.920 | was published in the early 1980s.

01:39:19.540 | One of Professor Toon's professors was Carl Sagan,

01:39:23.040 | who was sort of the most famous author

01:39:25.360 | of the nuclear winter theory.

01:39:27.280 | And, you know,

01:39:29.800 | there were all kinds of controversies about it

01:39:31.560 | when it came out, including the defense department

01:39:33.480 | saying it was Soviet propaganda, which it wasn't.

01:39:37.040 | And what the nuclear winter author,

01:39:41.080 | authors conceded back in the '80s

01:39:44.800 | was that their modeling was just the best it could be

01:39:48.080 | based on what they had at the time.

01:39:50.320 | And so now flash forward to where we are in 2024,

01:39:54.780 | and talking to Professor Toon,

01:39:56.560 | who's been working on this issue

01:39:58.000 | for all these decades since,

01:39:59.840 | he shared with me how the climate models today

01:40:04.840 | with the systems we have, the computer systems,

01:40:07.640 | reveal that actually nuclear winter is worse, right?

01:40:12.240 | So to answer your questions,

01:40:15.240 | the bombs stopped falling.

01:40:17.280 | In my scenario, 72 minutes after they first launch.

01:40:21.060 | The bombs stopped falling.

01:40:22.880 | And then the mega fires begin.

01:40:25.340 | Each nuclear weapon will have,

01:40:27.440 | according to the defense department,

01:40:29.280 | a mega fire that will burn between

01:40:31.480 | 100 and 300 square miles.

01:40:33.600 | So 1,000 weapons, 1,500 weapons,

01:40:37.520 | think about those mega fires.

01:40:39.440 | Everything is burning, forests, cities.

01:40:42.800 | Think about the pyrotoxins in all the cities,

01:40:45.960 | you know, high-rises burning.

01:40:48.080 | And all of this soot gets lofted into the air,

01:40:52.180 | according to Toon, some 300 billion pounds of soot.

01:40:59.120 | And what happens?

01:41:00.400 | It blocks out the sun.

01:41:02.800 | And without sun, we have nuclear winter.

01:41:06.520 | We have a situation whereby ice sheets form.

01:41:11.520 | You're talking about bodies of water

01:41:15.320 | in places like Iowa being frozen for 10 years.

01:41:19.160 | - So temperature drops.

01:41:20.840 | - Temperature plummets, right?

01:41:23.680 | And there are all kinds of papers

01:41:25.280 | that have been written about this,

01:41:27.040 | using modern, you know, systems.

01:41:31.140 | And the numbers vary,

01:41:33.600 | but the bottom line is agriculture fails.

01:41:37.720 | - Food obviously dies.

01:41:40.360 | So the agriculture system completely shuts down.

01:41:44.460 | So the food sources shut down.

01:41:45.960 | So there's no food, there's no sun,

01:41:49.080 | temperature drops completely, no electricity.

01:41:51.400 | - And we haven't even spoken of radiation poisoning,

01:41:54.720 | because, you know, the radiation poisoning kills many people

01:41:58.560 | in the aftermath of the nuclear exchange.

01:42:02.200 | But after the nuclear freeze ends, after nuclear winter,

01:42:06.880 | you know, after the sun starts to come back,

01:42:08.780 | let's say eight, nine, 10 years,

01:42:11.340 | now you have no ozone layer,

01:42:13.140 | or you have a severely depleted ozone layer.

01:42:15.400 | And so the sun's rays are now poisonous.

01:42:18.680 | So you have people living underground,

01:42:20.760 | and you have this great thawing.

01:42:22.480 | And with that great thawing comes pathogens and plague.

01:42:26.040 | And you have this, you know,

01:42:28.160 | system where the small bodied animals,

01:42:30.840 | the insects and whatnot, begin reproducing really fast.

01:42:33.600 | And the larger body animals, like you and me,

01:42:36.000 | begin to go extinct.

01:42:38.080 | Professor Toon said it to me this way.

01:42:39.700 | You know, he said, 66 million years ago,

01:42:42.920 | an asteroid hit earth, killed all the dinosaurs,

01:42:46.540 | and wiped out 70% of the species.

01:42:50.480 | A nuclear war would likely do the same.

01:42:53.200 | And so here we are talking about this

01:42:55.480 | because there is a difference.

01:42:57.720 | There's nothing you can do about an asteroid,

01:42:59.920 | but there is something you can do about a nuclear war.

01:43:02.760 | - Do you think it's possible

01:43:05.480 | that some humans will survive all of this?

01:43:08.700 | So if we look, I mean, how long would it be,

01:43:11.880 | would it be decades, would it be centuries

01:43:15.620 | before the, you start to have,

01:43:19.280 | earth starts to have the capacity to grow food again?

01:43:25.260 | - Carl Sagan talked about that in his,

01:43:27.540 | this amazing book that he wrote

01:43:28.820 | with two scientist colleagues called "The Cold and the Dark."

01:43:32.540 | And they have, there's a bunch of essays

01:43:34.660 | about exactly this, right?

01:43:36.180 | Like how, what would happen and how long would it take?

01:43:38.840 | It's really interesting.

01:43:40.260 | It's dated, you know, it's from the '80s,

01:43:41.860 | but man, is it shocking.

01:43:43.820 | And you think about that where, okay,

01:43:46.980 | so men return to sort of the worst,

01:43:49.220 | most base versions of themselves.

01:43:51.940 | Civilization is gone, right?

01:43:53.860 | Meaning, you know, civil society.

01:43:56.580 | There's no rule of law, it's just fend for yourself.

01:43:58.940 | There's, you know, people fighting over

01:44:00.940 | what little resources there are.

01:44:02.820 | Man returns to a hunter-gatherer state.

01:44:05.300 | And to really think about this idea,

01:44:07.220 | I looked at the oldest known archeological site

01:44:11.260 | in the world in Turkey, which is called Göbekli Tepe.

01:44:15.420 | And it's really fascinating to me

01:44:17.960 | because I interviewed one of the two archeologists

01:44:21.380 | who first found this site in the early '90s.

01:44:24.380 | And the lead archeologist was a guy named Klaus Schmidt,

01:44:28.380 | and Michael Morsh was the young graduate student

01:44:30.700 | who was with him.

01:44:31.540 | And Morsh's description of like coming upon this

01:44:36.540 | like rumored to be site,

01:44:39.320 | there was something called a wishing tree on the site,

01:44:41.660 | which I just found so human and perfect

01:44:44.180 | that it was this magical place.

01:44:45.900 | And it was locatable because there was a wishing tree

01:44:48.940 | on a hill and it's where people went to wish

01:44:52.140 | and to hope that their wishes came true.

01:44:54.300 | I mean, how human is that, right?

01:44:57.260 | And that is where beneath the wishing tree,

01:44:59.780 | kind of like in the shadow of the wishing tree,

01:45:01.580 | there was a tep, which is a hill.

01:45:03.560 | And beneath that, there is the oldest known civilization

01:45:08.900 | in the world.

01:45:09.740 | 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter gatherers

01:45:12.560 | built this site.

01:45:14.600 | Why? We don't know.

01:45:16.520 | But I imagined when through Morsh's descriptions

01:45:18.960 | of coming upon, like, you know, he tripped on a rock,

01:45:21.880 | he told me, right?

01:45:23.320 | He tripped over a stone that turned out to be

01:45:26.360 | the top part of a 12,000 year old sculpted man,

01:45:31.360 | giant pillar, right?

01:45:35.280 | And he talked about coming upon that.

01:45:37.560 | And then no one knows really what Gobekli Tepe was for.

01:45:41.280 | And that makes my mind try and answer the question

01:45:46.280 | you asked me internally, right?

01:45:48.800 | Just as like a human who's here on earth

01:45:50.840 | for the amount of time I'm here.

01:45:52.020 | Like, if there were a nuclear war, what would it be like?

01:45:55.780 | What would it be like when someone in the future,

01:45:59.040 | would we become archeologists one day?

01:46:01.960 | Would civilization rebuild?

01:46:03.720 | Would we develop computers?

01:46:04.960 | Who knows?

01:46:05.880 | It's interesting to think about.

01:46:06.920 | I hope we never have to.

01:46:08.360 | - What would we remember about this time?

01:46:10.760 | It is terrifying to think that most of it

01:46:15.040 | will be forgotten.

01:46:16.080 | Everything we kind of assume will not be forgotten.

01:46:19.720 | We think maybe some of the technological developments

01:46:21.760 | will be forgotten.

01:46:23.000 | But we assume like some of history won't be forgotten.

01:46:26.600 | But realistically, especially the,

01:46:30.920 | us descending into primitive survival,

01:46:34.520 | probably everything since the industrial age

01:46:37.240 | will be forgotten.

01:46:38.400 | Like everything.

01:46:40.120 | Maybe some religious ideas will persist.

01:46:44.400 | Some stories and myths will persist.

01:46:47.120 | But like all the wisdom we've gathered,

01:46:49.960 | higher level sort of technological wisdom would be gone.

01:46:54.560 | That's terrifying to think about.

01:46:57.640 | And like, maybe even as you touch on

01:47:02.840 | the very fact of nuclear war might be forgotten.

01:47:05.520 | Like the lessons of nuclear war might be forgotten.

01:47:09.840 | That there are these weapons,

01:47:11.640 | sort of the obvious elephant in the room

01:47:15.640 | would be one of the things that's completely forgotten.

01:47:18.800 | Or become so vague in the recollection of humans

01:47:22.560 | that our understanding will change.

01:47:26.480 | It's almost as if a God descended on earth

01:47:28.960 | and destroyed everything.

01:47:30.040 | Maybe that's how it will persist.

01:47:31.920 | Sort of like mythological interpretation

01:47:34.360 | of what nuclear weapons are.

01:47:36.880 | That's terrifying.

01:47:38.360 | 'Cause then it could repeat again.

01:47:40.280 | - But I think for me, the idea of the,

01:47:45.680 | what is buried becomes very interesting and very human.

01:47:50.800 | And in a strange way, optimistic and positive.

01:47:54.480 | Because if you can visualize that wishing tree,

01:47:57.200 | and I have a picture of it in the book

01:47:59.280 | from one of the archeologists who work on that, right?

01:48:02.280 | You think, what were they wishing?

01:48:04.840 | What were they wishing for, right?

01:48:07.080 | And then you think of your own self,

01:48:08.560 | what do I wish for in this world, right?

01:48:10.400 | Because, I do think all things

01:48:14.400 | come from what happens,

01:48:18.000 | metaphorically around the dinner table, right?

01:48:21.200 | Like what people put their eyes on

01:48:24.200 | becomes interesting and expands.

01:48:26.680 | What people talk about.

01:48:28.480 | And ultimately, when you think about the long arc of time

01:48:33.480 | in human civilization,

01:48:35.440 | it does kind of make you wanna communicate more

01:48:39.840 | with your enemies, with your adversaries.

01:48:42.840 | And I think about the quote,

01:48:45.800 | what Einstein is said to have said,

01:48:47.680 | which is that he was asked,

01:48:50.640 | what weapons World War III would be fought with?

01:48:55.320 | And he said, I don't know,

01:48:58.880 | but I know that World War IV

01:49:01.520 | will be fought with sticks and stones.

01:49:03.720 | - Let me ask you about the great filter.

01:49:07.760 | When you look up into our galaxy,

01:49:12.560 | into our universe, look up at the sky,

01:49:15.920 | do you think there's other alien civilizations

01:49:20.820 | that are contending with some similar questions?

01:49:23.720 | And perhaps the reason we have not definitively

01:49:28.360 | seen alien civilizations is because

01:49:32.000 | the others have failed to find a solution

01:49:34.880 | to this great filter, something like nuclear weapons.

01:49:37.940 | - I'm not sure, I'm gonna have to think about that question.

01:49:43.600 | But what does come to mind is an answer

01:49:49.320 | that was given to me similarly, right?

01:49:52.560 | By a man, by Ed Mitchell who went to the moon, right?

01:49:57.400 | And he was the sixth man to walk on the moon.

01:50:02.240 | And so his opinion, I think might count

01:50:05.760 | a little more than mine on that subject

01:50:07.680 | because his lens is so much greater, right?

01:50:12.640 | And Mitchell was vilified when he got back from the moon

01:50:19.760 | because it became known that he believed

01:50:22.500 | in things like extrasensory perception

01:50:25.640 | and this kind of mystical, metaphysical way

01:50:31.520 | of looking at the world.

01:50:33.460 | And he really suffered from that.

01:50:36.120 | I mean, he was ridiculed and he lost a lot

01:50:37.820 | of his career and his friends.

01:50:40.540 | But what he said to me in our interview

01:50:43.200 | about his trip home from the moon,

01:50:49.600 | answers that great filter question, I think,

01:50:52.120 | in a way I might wanna adopt, right?

01:50:55.080 | Which is this, that he said that as they were returning

01:51:00.080 | from the moon to earth, he looked down at the earth

01:51:06.240 | and I'm paraphrasing him, I write all this

01:51:09.440 | in "Phenomena," an earlier book.

01:51:11.300 | But the paraphrasing is that he looked down from the earth

01:51:15.200 | and it was 1971 and he thought about all the conflict

01:51:19.220 | going on down below, particularly the Vietnam War

01:51:23.320 | where many of his friends were.

01:51:25.440 | And then he looked behind him into the great vast galaxy

01:51:30.440 | and he had a moment, he says, that was like an epiphany,

01:51:36.320 | like not a near death experience,

01:51:38.020 | but a sort of near life experience, right?

01:51:40.220 | Where he believed that the human consciousness,

01:51:45.120 | which is where so much of this thoughtfulness

01:51:47.800 | about metaphysics and ESP perhaps come from,

01:51:52.800 | Mitchell's theory was that human consciousness,

01:51:59.560 | the way to understand it had something to do

01:52:03.240 | with realizing that man's inner life

01:52:06.720 | and man's outer life are deeply connected

01:52:10.000 | in the same way that man is connected to the galaxy.

01:52:14.720 | And he said it much more eloquently,

01:52:17.160 | but you kinda get the idea that,

01:52:19.560 | and I think it's why humans have always loved to look up,

01:52:23.880 | right, that there's more there.

01:52:28.120 | And it's a bit like the wish,

01:52:29.320 | it's like the big version of the wishing tree, you know?

01:52:32.160 | What do I wish for for myself?

01:52:35.040 | And what is maybe perhaps the realignment of thinking

01:52:40.040 | for those of us in search of happiness, right?

01:52:42.840 | And rather instead of war is,

01:52:45.820 | you know, what does it mean to have a conscience,

01:52:50.820 | to have consciousness?

01:52:54.740 | What does it mean to be a thinking person?

01:52:56.640 | What does it mean to be on this earth,

01:52:59.820 | to be born, to live, to die?

01:53:02.980 | And then there is legacy.

01:53:04.300 | And so all of those ideas are,

01:53:08.240 | I think, foster the kind of conversation

01:53:14.040 | that de-escalates conflict.

01:53:17.100 | - Yeah, so in some deep way,

01:53:21.060 | so the mysteries of what's out there

01:53:22.500 | when we look out to the stars

01:53:24.100 | are the same mysteries that we find

01:53:30.020 | in when trying to understand the human mind.

01:53:32.260 | And they're coupled in some way.

01:53:36.140 | For me, thinking about alien civilizations out there

01:53:40.060 | is really the same kind of question,

01:53:43.460 | which is, what are we?

01:53:45.120 | What is this?

01:53:46.020 | What are we doing here?

01:53:48.000 | How do we come here?

01:53:49.240 | Why does it seem to be so magical

01:53:52.520 | and beautiful and powerful?

01:53:55.000 | Now, where's it going?

01:53:56.520 | Because it feels like we're really,

01:53:59.880 | perhaps for the first time in history,

01:54:04.640 | are in a moment where we can destroy ourselves.

01:54:07.400 | And so naturally you ask, well, where's others like us?

01:54:13.320 | Is it perhaps, are we inevitably

01:54:17.840 | going to a place where we'll destroy ourselves?

01:54:21.580 | Is it basically inevitable that we destroy ourselves?

01:54:24.380 | We become too powerful and insufficiently wise

01:54:29.140 | to know what to do with that power.

01:54:30.880 | But like you said, probably the answers to that are in here.

01:54:38.340 | We don't need to look out there.

01:54:41.040 | - I'd love to ask you about the extrasensory perception.

01:54:45.620 | You've written, like you said, the book "Phenomena"

01:54:48.360 | on the secret history of the US government's investigations

01:54:52.400 | into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.

01:54:56.520 | What are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities

01:55:00.160 | that were explored by the government?

01:55:02.300 | And maybe just in general, ESP, what is it?

01:55:04.600 | What do you know of it?

01:55:07.960 | - The book was so interesting to report

01:55:09.720 | because I spend so much time dealing

01:55:12.300 | with like mechanized systems, machines, war machines.

01:55:16.440 | And yet the military and intelligence were

01:55:19.640 | and continue to be incredibly interested

01:55:22.680 | in the human mind, in consciousness.

01:55:25.420 | And so if one is called hard science,

01:55:28.840 | what we're talking about now is called squishy science.

01:55:31.680 | And it was really interesting to delve into that world.

01:55:34.560 | It just couldn't be farther from weapons and war.

01:55:39.920 | Or could it, right?

01:55:40.880 | And then I really began thinking,

01:55:42.760 | well, before science and technology,

01:55:46.680 | sort of the supernatural ruled the world.

01:55:51.680 | The Oracle of Delphi in Greece exists

01:55:55.560 | for the pre, before the common error rulers to go

01:56:00.560 | and beg to learn from the powers that be

01:56:05.000 | what was going to happen, right?

01:56:06.800 | So all ESP programs, I think,

01:56:11.800 | pull from that origin story, right?

01:56:14.360 | The leaders desire to know.

01:56:16.960 | And so I really found it amazing

01:56:21.920 | that many people think these systems

01:56:24.240 | or rather these programs started in the '70s.

01:56:26.400 | I learned they actually began right after World War II.

01:56:31.320 | And that was because, and here, in my reporting,

01:56:36.140 | I find all things sort of always circle back

01:56:38.680 | to the Third Reich, to the Nazis.

01:56:40.560 | The Nazis had a massive occult program,

01:56:45.000 | an ESP program, psychokinesis program, astrology.

01:56:50.000 | Both Hitler and Himmler were deeply interested

01:56:53.760 | in these occult concepts.

01:56:56.360 | And after, I learned from records at the National Archives

01:57:00.120 | that after the war, you know,

01:57:04.400 | half of everything went to the Soviet Union.

01:57:06.660 | And I'm talking about the trove of Nazi documents

01:57:08.760 | from which the superpowers were then going to learn

01:57:11.240 | to fight future wars.

01:57:12.780 | And half of them went to the United States.

01:57:14.640 | And so we got this trove of documents about all of this

01:57:19.640 | and the Soviets got the other.

01:57:21.740 | And so it set off a kind of psychic arms race,

01:57:24.520 | which in a weird way paralleled the nuclear arms race,

01:57:28.460 | which we've been talking about,

01:57:30.140 | in as much that it led one side

01:57:32.860 | to constantly wonder what the other side had.

01:57:36.300 | Have they been able to find anything interesting

01:57:41.440 | in this squishy science analysis

01:57:46.080 | of trying to see how the human mind

01:57:47.920 | could be used as a weapon?

01:57:49.220 | The CIA most definitely believed

01:57:53.480 | from my reading of the documents

01:57:55.540 | that there was something very legit, shall we say,

01:58:00.120 | about ESP.

01:58:01.240 | It couldn't, it was uncontrollable, it was unreliable,

01:58:04.220 | but nonetheless it existed.

01:58:05.800 | And being the intelligence agency that they are,

01:58:08.780 | they cared less about why it worked.

01:58:11.580 | They just wanted to know how they could use it.

01:58:14.180 | And then it got into all kinds of elements

01:58:17.180 | of placebo effect and this, you know.

01:58:20.360 | And, you know, when the military stepped in

01:58:22.800 | and got involved in the programs,

01:58:24.900 | that was a complete disaster in my opinion,

01:58:27.880 | because the military needs to control everything

01:58:30.320 | in a mechanized, systematic way.

01:58:32.700 | And so they started, for example,

01:58:34.500 | teaching people to be psychic,

01:58:36.620 | which is a really, really, really bad idea.

01:58:39.700 | I mean, and, you know,

01:58:43.540 | flash forward to where we are today,

01:58:45.260 | these programs still exist.

01:58:46.720 | There's a Navy program, which is working on,

01:58:50.860 | based on a lot of data that came back

01:58:52.580 | from the war on terror with certain soldiers,

01:58:56.700 | knowing, you know, wait, don't walk down that path.

01:59:00.400 | There is an IED there.

01:59:02.320 | And they call this the spidey sense.

01:59:04.000 | And they actually have a program that works from this.

01:59:07.400 | So these things never go away.

01:59:09.160 | They kind of circle around in terms of, you know,

01:59:12.040 | being made fun of and then taken seriously

01:59:14.440 | and a little of this and of that.

01:59:17.000 | My biggest takeaway from writing that book

01:59:19.640 | was a quote that I referenced in the beginning,

01:59:23.560 | which is the Thomas theorem.

01:59:25.600 | And it says, "If men define situations as real,

01:59:30.600 | "they are real in their consequences."

01:59:33.220 | - Yeah.

01:59:35.200 | I mean, placebo, as you've mentioned,

01:59:37.700 | is a fascinating concept.

01:59:39.800 | By the way, a short plug.

01:59:41.760 | I started listening to it.

01:59:42.840 | Andrew Huberman just released a podcast

01:59:46.240 | on placebo, the placebo effect.

01:59:49.200 | - Does he know the origin story of placebo?

01:59:51.840 | We'll have to ask him.

01:59:52.720 | - We'll have to ask him, yeah.

01:59:53.560 | - But are you ready for this?

01:59:54.380 | - Yes.

01:59:55.220 | - For the CIA, okay?

01:59:58.040 | And not only that, I can tell you that Dr. Henry Beecher,

02:00:01.040 | Harvard, I think he was also at MIT for a bit,

02:00:05.300 | he came up with that term.

02:00:08.480 | And you might even say for the CIA.

02:00:10.800 | - Does that trouble you that so much of this

02:00:14.920 | is coming from the CIA first?

02:00:17.400 | - You mean the placebo concept or the--

02:00:19.120 | - The placebo concept, but a lot of the sort of

02:00:22.940 | scientific investigations?

02:00:24.740 | - Listen, I have such mixed feelings about the CIA

02:00:28.980 | as one should.

02:00:29.820 | I think you should have mixed feelings

02:00:31.220 | about anything that you cover as a reporter

02:00:33.500 | or as a human, because,

02:00:35.420 | and maybe change that from mixed to conflicting, right?

02:00:39.540 | Because there are really positive elements

02:00:42.820 | of every organization within the federal government.

02:00:46.060 | I mean, my first learning about the CIA

02:00:49.420 | came from the work I did on the Area 51 book

02:00:53.160 | about their aerial reconnaissance programs,

02:00:55.600 | which were set up, again, to prevent World War III, right?

02:00:59.320 | Nuclear World War III.

02:01:00.320 | It was this idea that information was king.

02:01:03.600 | The U-2 spy plane was developed out at Area 51,

02:01:07.440 | and I interviewed Hervey Stockman,

02:01:10.640 | the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2,

02:01:14.520 | gathered all this intelligence, prevented wars.

02:01:18.480 | Later, I wrote a book about the CIA's paramilitary,

02:01:22.900 | Surprise, Kill, Vanish.

02:01:24.300 | So like, just when I was thinking,

02:01:26.140 | wow, the CIA is doing all this amazing, you know,

02:01:29.380 | non-kinetic activity with aerial reconnaissance,

02:01:31.980 | then you learn about their kill programs,

02:01:35.180 | and that's a whole different set of issues.

02:01:38.460 | - It turns out, as you write in that book,

02:01:40.060 | that the CIA assassinates people sometimes,

02:01:44.940 | and we'll talk about it.

02:01:46.780 | But anyway, like you said, conflicting feelings.

02:01:51.080 | - I mean, I work with sources to report my books,

02:01:54.160 | and so put yourself in my shoes, right?

02:01:58.120 | I interview for dozens or hundreds of hours

02:02:03.120 | my primary sources.

02:02:04.680 | In the case of the Surprise, Kill, Vanish book,

02:02:08.540 | I traveled with Billy Waugh,

02:02:10.200 | the longest-serving CIA operator,

02:02:13.000 | back to the scene of the crime.

02:02:15.000 | You know, back to the battle, we went to Hanoi,

02:02:16.800 | we went to Havana.

02:02:18.080 | And you really get to know someone,

02:02:22.020 | and that's when I say conflicting.

02:02:23.760 | You know, I work with sources on a real trust basis, right?

02:02:28.760 | And sometimes people will tell me things.

02:02:30.600 | They'll say, "Annie, this is off the record.

02:02:32.840 | "This is for you to know about me on deep background

02:02:37.260 | "because I want you to know who I am."

02:02:40.560 | And that's powerful.

02:02:41.760 | And a lot of times, it's personal, right?

02:02:44.040 | It's personal.

02:02:44.960 | It's about their personal life.

02:02:46.560 | And they don't want that,

02:02:48.760 | and it isn't apropos to what I'm writing about,

02:02:51.800 | but I need to know that.

02:02:52.920 | And that's where it gets conflicted, in a good way,

02:02:56.740 | because you realize where we're all such creatures

02:03:00.240 | of our personal lives, right?

02:03:03.440 | So you have a professional life

02:03:06.240 | where your national security are in your hands.

02:03:09.460 | I don't know what that is like.

02:03:11.560 | - I wonder if you could just speak to that.

02:03:13.640 | You've interviewed so many powerful people,

02:03:16.240 | so many fascinating people.

02:03:18.360 | And as you've spoken about, trust is fundamental to that.

02:03:23.360 | So they open up and really show you into their world.

02:03:27.840 | What does it take to do that?

02:03:30.840 | - I think willingness.

02:03:36.100 | We were talking about trust earlier.

02:03:39.160 | Like, you have to trust that there's, I have to trust

02:03:42.880 | that there's a reason I find myself

02:03:44.400 | in a certain situation, right?

02:03:46.600 | Otherwise, it would just be a constant doubt paradox, right?

02:03:51.560 | Why am I here?

02:03:52.380 | What am I doing?

02:03:53.220 | And so I trust that I'm going to learn something of value.

02:03:59.160 | And so I'm willing to listen.

02:04:03.720 | I really am willing to listen, right?

02:04:05.560 | Because, and so far, it's always proven,

02:04:12.440 | you know, the expectations I might have

02:04:14.960 | going into something are dwarfed by the outcome

02:04:18.680 | because people are so interesting.

02:04:21.080 | And because the people that I interview,

02:04:24.080 | because I write about war and weapons

02:04:25.880 | and national security and government secrets,

02:04:28.240 | and the people I interview are at the heart of all of this,

02:04:31.600 | I mean, they are really capable people,

02:04:34.640 | intellectually brilliant, physically capable.

02:04:38.980 | They go so far out on the limb to do their jobs.

02:04:43.220 | And by the way, the reason they're talking to me

02:04:44.860 | is 'cause they're still alive.

02:04:46.980 | And so many of their colleagues are dead.

02:04:49.380 | So it gives them also a wisdom about, you know, life,

02:04:54.260 | about sacrifice, not in cliched sort of nationalistic,

02:04:59.260 | jingoistic terms whatsoever.

02:05:01.700 | I'm talking like real, real, what is their real truth?

02:05:07.780 | You know, when I went to Vietnam with Billy Wah,

02:05:10.420 | I mean, so much of it was, the details are just,

02:05:14.660 | you know, every detail, right?

02:05:16.360 | I mean, starting with the fact that he showed up at my house

02:05:21.300 | with a giant suitcase and a bunch of clothes,

02:05:26.060 | dry cleaning, pressed clothes in plastic hangers,

02:05:30.980 | carrying them.

02:05:31.800 | I'm like, Billy, we're going to Vietnam

02:05:34.580 | and we're going back into the jungle

02:05:36.660 | to find the Oscar eight battle site.

02:05:38.620 | Like, what are you carrying, right?

02:05:42.620 | And he got really mad at me,

02:05:43.820 | did not like anyone correcting him.

02:05:45.540 | And I got my husband on the job, like, Kevin,

02:05:47.820 | you got to sort this out, right?

02:05:48.980 | And what transpired was that Billy Wah

02:05:51.300 | had never taken a trip for personal reasons.

02:05:56.260 | He operated, I think, in 62 countries

02:05:59.060 | every single time for the CIA.

02:06:01.220 | And it would go like this, Billy,

02:06:02.900 | go to there and get to there, right?

02:06:05.020 | And that's what he would do.

02:06:05.860 | When he arrived, whatever he needed, he would just get,

02:06:09.380 | you know, it's not a fashion trip, right?

02:06:11.380 | So he had no idea how to pack for an overseas trip.

02:06:14.780 | This was like, oh my God,

02:06:16.260 | how can you not have the hugest smile

02:06:17.880 | on your face going into this?

02:06:19.260 | I'm with a guy who's 89 years old.

02:06:20.980 | He's got eight bullet, you know,

02:06:23.020 | he's had eight Purple Hearts from Vietnam, right?

02:06:27.420 | I mean, he operated against Osama bin Laden

02:06:30.100 | 10 years before 9/11.

02:06:32.180 | He went after bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was 72.

02:06:35.480 | And he went after Qaddafi during the Arab Spring

02:06:38.620 | when he was 82.

02:06:39.860 | And now here he is with me going to Hanoi, you know?

02:06:42.500 | The details, those human details.

02:06:46.340 | But my husband repacked his bag

02:06:49.500 | and, you know, like got him a proper suitcase

02:06:51.900 | that was carryable and small and didn't have the hangers,

02:06:54.340 | you know, he wasn't trailing the hangers.

02:06:56.880 | But it was the trip home in the taxi

02:07:01.880 | that I got at this really big reveal.

02:07:03.960 | And Billy reached into that small suitcase

02:07:08.000 | my husband had given him

02:07:09.780 | and pulled out a rolled up American flag.

02:07:13.560 | And he had taken this flag,

02:07:17.120 | 'cause I had tried to help him pack and he wouldn't let me.

02:07:19.160 | And I just thought it was like an old guy being stubborn,

02:07:21.060 | but he didn't want me to see

02:07:22.860 | that he was bringing an American flag to Vietnam,

02:07:24.980 | which is not legal.

02:07:26.200 | And he wanted to bring that flag

02:07:29.420 | and take it around everywhere with him,

02:07:31.940 | as he explained to me later,

02:07:33.240 | to honor all of his friends who died there 50 years ago.

02:07:37.160 | And then when the trip was finished,

02:07:39.600 | he gave me that flag and it's in my office.

02:07:42.480 | And that's the kind of relationship

02:07:45.160 | that you can develop with people as a reporter,

02:07:47.800 | if you're willing to go the extra mile with them,

02:07:49.960 | to trust them, that they'll tell you things of value.

02:07:53.120 | And to me, something like that is as a value,

02:07:56.680 | as any, you know, secret mission,

02:07:59.440 | I'm able to get declassified,

02:08:01.540 | because we are a nation of people.

02:08:03.660 | - And probably there's a bunch of human details

02:08:05.960 | that you can't possibly express in words,

02:08:08.460 | things left unspoken, but you saw in the silence,

02:08:11.720 | exchange between the two of you, the sadness,

02:08:14.020 | maybe you could see in his face,

02:08:18.240 | looking back at memories of the people he's lost,

02:08:23.160 | all that kind of stuff.

02:08:24.160 | - All that kind of stuff.

02:08:25.420 | - You mentioned you wrote a book on Area 51.

02:08:30.180 | For people who don't know,

02:08:32.620 | you've written a lot about security,

02:08:37.580 | the military, secrets, all this kind of stuff.

02:08:42.100 | So Area 51 is one of the legendary centers

02:08:46.900 | of all of these kinds of topics.

02:08:50.020 | So high level first is, what is Area 51?

02:08:54.400 | As you understand it, as you've written about,

02:08:58.980 | the lore and the reality.

02:09:00.700 | - I think everybody wants to know about Area 51,

02:09:03.900 | because it kind of, it's like this American enigma,

02:09:07.120 | you know, it's like to some people,

02:09:09.060 | it's the Shangri-La of, you know,

02:09:12.380 | test bed aerospace programs, right?

02:09:14.940 | And to others, it's the place of captured aliens, right?

02:09:18.020 | And everything in between.

02:09:19.860 | I had the great fortune of interviewing 75 people

02:09:23.880 | who lived and worked at that base

02:09:25.540 | for extended periods of time,

02:09:28.160 | mostly leading up to the '90s,

02:09:30.780 | because everything since then is classified, right?

02:09:32.780 | So things get declassified after decades,

02:09:35.460 | not everything, but some,

02:09:36.660 | and that allows you to piece together stories.

02:09:39.620 | - So you've talked to a lot of people that work there.

02:09:42.220 | What can you describe as the sort of the history

02:09:45.660 | of technological development that went on there?

02:09:47.980 | - I mean, Area 51 is huge, by the way.

02:09:50.180 | And it's, you know, it's a secret,

02:09:51.620 | it's a top secret military facility

02:09:54.060 | inside a top secret military facility,

02:09:57.060 | inside the Nevada Test and Training Range,

02:10:00.040 | which is this massive, not secret facility, right?

02:10:03.960 | So you're just talking about layers,

02:10:05.900 | talk about peeling the onion in reverse.

02:10:08.360 | And it began as a place to test the U-2 spy plane.

02:10:12.140 | And literally the CIA set up shop there

02:10:17.720 | to build this plane away from the public eye.

02:10:24.320 | And then that led to another espionage platform

02:10:28.640 | called the A-12 Oxcart, which is, you know,

02:10:30.920 | anyone who's seen the X-Men movies knows about the SR-71.

02:10:35.500 | But, and that's a two-seater, right?

02:10:37.520 | And before that, there was the A-12 Oxcart.

02:10:40.000 | And that was the CIA's stealth Mach 3 spy plane.

02:10:43.880 | You know, think about that in the early 1960s.

02:10:46.380 | It's astonishing.

02:10:48.220 | And I interviewed the pilots who flew it.

02:10:50.320 | - What did they say about it?

02:10:52.420 | - Oh my God.

02:10:54.020 | I mean, you know, look, I describe in detail in Area 51,

02:10:58.420 | but also the amazing thing, Lex, about that was that,

02:11:01.860 | and you know, I just look back on that with such fondness.

02:11:03.820 | This is like in 2009 when I was reporting that.

02:11:07.220 | And all, many of the guys who were in their 80s and 90s

02:11:10.220 | were World War II heroes, like serious World War II heroes,

02:11:14.180 | like Colonel Slater, who was the commander of Area 51.

02:11:17.300 | He flew the U-2 on the missions

02:11:20.420 | called the Black Cat missions over China in the early 1960s

02:11:25.420 | to see about their Lop Nur nuclear facility, right?

02:11:28.780 | So all of these things tie in

02:11:31.340 | when you're reporting on military and intelligence programs.

02:11:35.280 | But these guys had been World War II heroes,

02:11:38.740 | and then were given this cushy job out at Area 51, you know?

02:11:43.300 | And it just came with all these perks.

02:11:45.020 | Colonel Slater told me this one perk I just love so much.

02:11:48.580 | They all had a hankering for lobster one day, right?

02:11:52.480 | And here they are in the middle of the desert in Nevada,

02:11:54.940 | and they have these really fast planes, you know?

02:11:57.940 | And they literally called, like they arranged,

02:12:00.540 | they didn't take the ox cart out for that one,

02:12:02.860 | but they got some lobsters from Massachusetts,

02:12:06.740 | like delivered to them in like record time.

02:12:08.900 | They didn't even need to put them on ice, you know?

02:12:11.240 | And again, those are these details where you're like,

02:12:13.620 | thank God, at least for me, thank God I got these details.

02:12:17.060 | These guys are all past now.

02:12:19.100 | - Yeah.

02:12:20.620 | So there's a lot of incredible

02:12:22.300 | technological work going on there.

02:12:24.160 | So the legend, the lore, like you said, aliens.

02:12:27.280 | Were there ever aliens in Area 51, as you understand it?

02:12:32.860 | - So I've interviewed hundreds of people.

02:12:36.980 | - That worked there.

02:12:38.260 | - Well, not just at Area 51,

02:12:39.620 | but in all the different national security

02:12:41.500 | and military intelligence and intelligence programs.

02:12:44.580 | And I personally have no reason to believe

02:12:49.540 | that aliens have ever visited Earth.

02:12:52.300 | That's just me personally.

02:12:53.760 | - Visited Earth, period.

02:12:55.140 | - I have no information that causes me to conclude

02:13:00.140 | that's the case.

02:13:01.140 | Now, with that said, many of the primary players

02:13:05.460 | in this present day, you know,

02:13:08.560 | there are aliens among us narrative,

02:13:11.400 | are in my phenomena book.

02:13:13.380 | I continue to communicate with a lot of these people.

02:13:16.140 | I'm talking about astrophysicists

02:13:18.740 | who fundamentally believe that there are aliens among us.

02:13:23.380 | Right?

02:13:24.820 | So we beg to differ on that issue.

02:13:28.080 | - But for you, in terms of doing research

02:13:32.660 | on government agencies that do top secret military work,

02:13:40.500 | I mean, they would know, right?

02:13:43.380 | So you have interviewed a lot of people that have,

02:13:46.520 | at every layer of the onion,

02:13:48.620 | you don't see evidence or a reason to believe

02:13:56.780 | that there was ever aliens or UFOs captured

02:14:00.540 | from out of this world.

02:14:02.020 | - That is correct.

02:14:02.980 | And even perhaps more important,

02:14:05.500 | and perhaps this colors my thinking,

02:14:07.620 | but I am uniquely familiar with disinformation programs

02:14:12.100 | put forth by the CIA or the agency,

02:14:14.980 | as it's called by insiders, right?

02:14:17.340 | And I've learned firsthand about these programs

02:14:21.080 | or rather learned from firsthand participants

02:14:23.580 | in strategic deception campaigns

02:14:26.360 | that the CIA has engaged in beginning with area 51.

02:14:30.380 | You know, the idea that all these reports

02:14:34.620 | of this U2 spy plane, this giant long wind,

02:14:39.620 | long winged aircraft flying 70,000 feet up,

02:14:43.760 | people didn't think airplanes could fly that high.

02:14:46.500 | And it's, you know, the sun shining off of it,

02:14:48.620 | it looked like a UFO and all the reports coming in.

02:14:51.380 | And the CIA opened up a UFO disinformation campaign office

02:14:56.380 | headed by a guy named Toto Otorenko,

02:15:01.220 | you know, specifically for this reason.

02:15:03.400 | Now, does that mean that every UFO sighting

02:15:06.140 | in the world has been a U2?

02:15:08.200 | No, but I come from it, from that lane of thinking.

02:15:13.200 | And there are so many strategic deception campaigns.

02:15:17.540 | And as I look over the decades

02:15:19.160 | of how these same UFO stories,

02:15:21.540 | and again, this is just my opinion based on my reporting,

02:15:24.300 | this narrative that keeps reoccurring,

02:15:27.500 | it seems to me like a very large catch-all

02:15:30.900 | to keep the public's attention on that, not on that.

02:15:34.320 | - So, to you,

02:15:36.960 | like sexy stories like UFOs

02:15:41.560 | are going to be leveraged by the CIA

02:15:45.720 | for strategic deception?

02:15:47.360 | - A hundred percent.

02:15:48.200 | I mean, Google Paul Benowitz.

02:15:50.120 | I'm always amazed that Paul Benowitz's story

02:15:52.840 | is not more widely spoken of.

02:15:55.060 | And I think that's because people,

02:15:58.400 | there's like the sort of ufologists

02:16:00.060 | or the people who are like absolutely convinced

02:16:02.680 | that aliens are among us.

02:16:04.800 | And I use that term loosely, but you know what I mean.

02:16:07.360 | And then there's the quote-unquote skeptics.

02:16:09.320 | And the skeptics tend to be sort of like self-righteous.

02:16:13.240 | And I would never want to be self-righteous.

02:16:15.240 | So I'm not a skeptic.

02:16:17.000 | I'm just, you know, agnostic, I suppose.

02:16:20.440 | But Google Paul Benowitz,

02:16:22.800 | and you can learn the story of that man

02:16:25.080 | who thought he saw a UFO in the '70s, early '80s,

02:16:28.960 | and the Air Force,

02:16:30.160 | because the Air Force intelligence community

02:16:33.240 | works hand-in-glove with CIA a lot.

02:16:36.160 | And some of the other intelligence agencies,

02:16:37.920 | of course, they're 17, not just the CIA.

02:16:40.920 | And they destroyed Paul Benowitz.

02:16:44.140 | They sent him to a mental institution

02:16:46.080 | by pulling a massive strategic deception campaign

02:16:50.080 | against him because they didn't want him to know

02:16:52.560 | about the technology that he was seeing

02:16:54.100 | at Kirkland Air Force Base.

02:16:56.300 | So look that up, and then you go, oh my God.

02:16:59.140 | And, you know, to my eye,

02:17:00.500 | you can apply any of these other names,

02:17:04.300 | substitute in Paul Benowitz,

02:17:06.860 | or any of the current individuals, you know,

02:17:09.060 | who really become convinced of X, Y, or Z

02:17:13.300 | when in fact there is a strategic deception campaign

02:17:15.660 | going on.

02:17:16.660 | - Yeah, there's a lot of incentive for the CIA

02:17:19.500 | and other intelligence agencies

02:17:21.580 | to get you to look the other way

02:17:23.940 | on whatever is happening.

02:17:26.240 | Plus, from a enemy perspective,

02:17:30.820 | whenever two nations are at war,

02:17:32.820 | to try to create hysteria in the other.

02:17:35.660 | - But then you have the Thomas theorem

02:17:37.500 | that becomes applicable there too.

02:17:39.340 | If men define situations as real,

02:17:42.020 | they are real in their consequences, right?

02:17:44.980 | So this idea of, like, UFOs and we're being lied to,

02:17:51.740 | it becomes real to many people.

02:17:55.660 | And then that creates a whole subset of problems

02:17:59.280 | to the point where things are spiraling out of control

02:18:03.040 | and there is no center anymore, right?

02:18:05.980 | So a lot of people that are briefed on programs

02:18:10.000 | maybe aren't even aware of their position

02:18:14.140 | within a greater campaign.

02:18:15.700 | Or I'm wrong and there are aliens among us.

02:18:21.300 | - Right, so I appreciate the possibility

02:18:24.620 | of acknowledging that you might be wrong.

02:18:27.700 | From everything you know about the US government,

02:18:31.180 | if there was an alien spacecraft,

02:18:33.820 | like, what do you think would happen?

02:18:35.020 | Would they be able to hold on to those secrets

02:18:37.580 | for decades?

02:18:39.680 | Like, would they want to hold on to those secrets?

02:18:43.740 | Like, what would they do?

02:18:46.380 | What's your sense?

02:18:48.260 | - I can't imagine that kind of exciting situation

02:18:53.260 | not becoming public information, right?

02:18:58.020 | And the counter to that is this, right?

02:19:00.180 | Which is, this is a very strong argument

02:19:02.540 | for why this is a big strategic deception campaign, right?

02:19:05.740 | Think about the defense department and the air,

02:19:10.740 | think about how jealously they guard its airspace, right?

02:19:18.100 | I mean, you had a Chinese balloon flying over

02:19:20.300 | and the whole world went crazy, right?

02:19:22.900 | It was front page news.

02:19:24.980 | So the fact that one element or a couple people

02:19:28.700 | in the defense department have made this statement,

02:19:31.140 | "We've lost control of our airspace

02:19:34.040 | over this UFO, alleged UFO craft that they can't explain."

02:19:39.040 | I don't buy that at all, zero.

02:19:43.100 | - Of course it's possible that, you know,

02:19:45.340 | it is alien spacecraft, if it is that,

02:19:49.140 | and they operate under a very different set

02:19:52.700 | of technological capabilities, in theory.

02:19:56.500 | - In my interviews with Jacques Vallée,

02:19:58.180 | who is the kind of grandfather of all ufology,

02:20:01.780 | and he's such an interesting person

02:20:03.380 | and has such a really unique origin story

02:20:06.100 | about how he came into all of this,

02:20:08.060 | and he's such a scientist, right?

02:20:09.500 | And he is profoundly dedicated to this issue

02:20:12.500 | and stands completely on the opposite end

02:20:15.100 | of the spectrum from me and knows a lot more

02:20:17.060 | and has studied this for decades more.

02:20:18.740 | But what he said to me is the most interesting thing,

02:20:21.480 | which is that it's not a military problem,

02:20:23.740 | it's an intelligence problem.

02:20:25.700 | Because Jacques believes that this is some kind

02:20:27.740 | of intelligence, right?

02:20:29.680 | Which really, the closest I can do

02:20:32.700 | to wrapping my head around that takes me to consciousness,

02:20:36.580 | right, the idea of what is consciousness.

02:20:39.660 | And I think that's where it becomes very interesting.

02:20:41.900 | I think the government is hiding bodies

02:20:44.980 | and crafts is very Paul Benoist, read it.

02:20:48.300 | Google it, look into it, right?

02:20:50.260 | - Yeah, yeah, I think this kind of flying saucer thing

02:20:53.940 | is a trivialization of what kind of,

02:20:58.360 | if there's alien civilizations out there.

02:21:00.260 | - Trivialization, that's a great word.

02:21:02.900 | Trivialization, that's, I agree with you.

02:21:05.500 | - I tend to believe that there's like a very large number

02:21:08.900 | of alien civilizations out there.

02:21:11.140 | And I believe we would have trouble comprehending

02:21:15.780 | what that even looks like, were they to visit.

02:21:18.420 | I tend to believe they are already here,

02:21:21.140 | have visited, and we're too dumb

02:21:23.560 | to understand what that even means.

02:21:25.780 | And they certainly would not appear

02:21:27.500 | as flying objects that defy gravity

02:21:32.500 | for brief moments of time on a low-resolution video.

02:21:36.700 | I tend to have humility about all this kind of stuff.

02:21:40.460 | But I think radical humility is required

02:21:42.500 | to even like open your eyes

02:21:43.900 | to what an alien intelligence would actually look like.

02:21:46.860 | And to me, it's beyond military applications.

02:21:51.260 | It's like the basic human question of like,

02:21:54.020 | what is even this thing?

02:21:55.300 | Like you mentioned consciousness that's going on.

02:21:57.460 | Like, where's this come from?

02:21:58.840 | Why is it so powerful?

02:22:00.340 | Is it unique in the universe?

02:22:02.300 | I tend to believe not.

02:22:04.740 | Of course, I hang out a bunch with other folks,

02:22:08.140 | like Elon, who believe we are alone.

02:22:11.180 | But I think that belief, just like you said,

02:22:15.620 | has power because it actually manifests itself in reality.

02:22:21.500 | So if you believe that we're alone in this universe,

02:22:26.540 | that's a great motivator to build rockets

02:22:28.580 | and become multi-planetary and save ourselves,

02:22:31.020 | especially in the case of nuclear war.

02:22:32.900 | Because otherwise, whatever this special sauce,

02:22:36.340 | this flame of consciousness will go out

02:22:40.220 | if we destroy ourselves on this earth.

02:22:41.820 | And for people like Elon, it's too high of a probability

02:22:45.560 | that we destroy ourselves on earth,

02:22:47.660 | not to try to become multi-planetary.

02:22:50.920 | In your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation

02:22:54.740 | that I think some people have criticized at the very end,

02:22:57.800 | that this might've been a disinformation campaign

02:23:02.900 | from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident

02:23:07.900 | was a remotely piloted plane

02:23:10.780 | with a, quote, "grotesque child-sized aviator."

02:23:14.940 | Just looking back at all that now, years later,

02:23:18.340 | what's the probability that it's true?

02:23:20.140 | What's the probability it's not?

02:23:21.820 | - So you know I've never revealed who that source is?

02:23:26.980 | - Yes. - Did you know that?

02:23:27.820 | - I know. - Want me to tell you?

02:23:29.060 | - With the source? - Yeah.

02:23:30.420 | - Okay, who is the source?

02:23:33.000 | - So before I say anything on that,

02:23:36.400 | let me speak to the question that you asked, right?

02:23:40.680 | So you asked me what's the probability

02:23:44.320 | that that is still standing as an idea

02:23:47.960 | 12, 13, 14 years later, right?

02:23:50.440 | So I continued to work with that source

02:23:52.760 | for years afterwards.

02:23:54.080 | We talked about this.

02:23:55.160 | Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him,

02:24:00.480 | and I knew his family 'cause I was an integral part of,

02:24:03.520 | you know, I was at his house,

02:24:05.420 | met all his kids, grandkids, and--

02:24:09.040 | - And we should say the source

02:24:11.360 | is the main expert advisor behind the story

02:24:14.640 | that it was, maybe you can explain what the story is

02:24:16.660 | that you're reporting in the book,

02:24:17.960 | that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin

02:24:22.800 | to cause mass hysteria in the United States.

02:24:25.880 | - Yes. - The very kind

02:24:26.800 | that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on.

02:24:28.920 | - Yes, predicated on the narrative

02:24:31.280 | of the War of the Worlds, right?

02:24:33.840 | And the War of the Worlds,

02:24:34.800 | when it was a radio program in the United States,

02:24:36.720 | made people go crazy.

02:24:37.660 | Oh my God, we're being invaded by aliens.

02:24:39.360 | Well, the government was always interested in this story,

02:24:41.960 | and Joseph Stalin was too.

02:24:43.280 | We know that from declassified documents, right?

02:24:46.080 | And so the source told me that the reason for this program

02:24:51.000 | and that the real Roswell crash remains

02:24:53.000 | were, in fact, it was a black propaganda hoax

02:24:58.080 | infiltrated or rather predicated at this idea

02:25:02.320 | that you were gonna overwhelm

02:25:03.680 | America's early warning air defense system,

02:25:06.120 | cause mayhem, and maybe be able to attack the United States.

02:25:08.920 | That was the plan.

02:25:09.760 | And Stalin was also messing with the United States,

02:25:12.420 | messing with Truman, who sort of turned his back on him,

02:25:15.880 | right, at Potsdam.

02:25:17.720 | And so this idea was,

02:25:21.720 | and the reason that the source is important,

02:25:23.520 | and unlike a lot of people, I saw this, I saw that,

02:25:27.400 | I learned that, was according to the source,

02:25:29.800 | once it was determined that this was a hoax

02:25:36.360 | and that Stalin was able to get a craft

02:25:39.080 | over the United States and it crashed,

02:25:41.640 | and it had people inside of it,

02:25:43.920 | they were people that were sort of deformed

02:25:47.600 | and meant surgically altered to look like aliens,

02:25:52.040 | the United States government decided

02:25:54.700 | that it needed to know what on earth that was all about,

02:25:58.620 | and if it was possible for us to have the same program.

02:26:00.920 | This is according to the source, right?

02:26:03.620 | And so it sounds preposterous.

02:26:06.220 | And if it was just someone saying,

02:26:08.180 | you might say, well, it's ridiculous,

02:26:09.800 | tell me and get them onto another subject.

02:26:12.060 | But the difference was, is this source,

02:26:14.740 | who was very well-placed and friends

02:26:16.360 | with all of the other 75 people,

02:26:18.780 | told me this as a confession, right?

02:26:22.620 | A real tearful confession,

02:26:24.660 | because what he said is he was involved

02:26:27.180 | in the American program to do the same thing.

02:26:29.940 | And people died,

02:26:30.940 | because there were human experiments that went on.

02:26:33.900 | And I write about this in the last 12 pages of Area 51.

02:26:36.740 | It was an explosive revelation,

02:26:39.660 | and I felt very confident in writing this,

02:26:42.060 | because the source wanted it written.

02:26:43.780 | Why?

02:26:44.620 | Because he said, I'm dedicated to my country.

02:26:48.020 | I know about being committed to national security,

02:26:51.780 | and this kind of thing must never happen.

02:26:53.700 | And if you give people too much power,

02:26:55.260 | they will take advantage of it.

02:26:57.180 | And he wanted it on the record.

02:26:59.500 | And his wife of 60 years did not know

02:27:02.300 | until after the book published,

02:27:04.180 | nor did his children, okay?

02:27:05.700 | So after the book published,

02:27:07.520 | I was called to his house and sat there with his family.

02:27:11.700 | And they said, tell us this isn't true.

02:27:13.940 | And he said, it is true, right?

02:27:15.500 | Now that source is Al O'Donnell,

02:27:20.540 | who is the nuclear weapons engineer

02:27:23.060 | who armed, wired, and fired 186 nuclear weapons, okay?

02:27:28.060 | So if you want to talk about something,

02:27:33.460 | you're the first person I've told that on the record,

02:27:35.500 | but it's kind of about time.

02:27:36.900 | - Wow.

02:27:38.700 | Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story,

02:27:45.480 | and it confused me, why?

02:27:47.620 | Because it's, given the context

02:27:50.900 | of everything you've described with the CIA

02:27:53.260 | and other intelligence agencies,

02:27:55.000 | it is reasonable that such an action would be taken.

02:27:58.640 | - And the source is extraordinarily credible, right?

02:28:05.020 | If you wanted to take the position,

02:28:07.420 | well, that person isn't very reliable,

02:28:09.420 | then you have to ask yourself,

02:28:11.140 | why did they have top secret clearances

02:28:14.860 | that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever?

02:28:18.680 | Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs.

02:28:22.140 | He was called the trigger man.

02:28:24.060 | And by the way,

02:28:24.900 | he told me that I could tell the world who he was.

02:28:28.460 | There's a lot of details that are really dark

02:28:32.700 | involving that program.

02:28:34.820 | And when is it appropriate, right?

02:28:37.580 | Well, it feels appropriate now, first of all,

02:28:39.400 | 'cause you and I have been talking for several hours.

02:28:41.180 | So this is what is truly a long form conversation,

02:28:44.860 | and it's the outcome of a very long time of my reporting

02:28:49.860 | and also being judicious about closing the loop on that.

02:28:55.120 | Because I do think it's important for people to know

02:28:59.200 | that sources have revelations.

02:29:04.200 | - And like you said, the programs,

02:29:08.800 | both on the Soviet side and the American side,

02:29:14.640 | conflicting, I think, is the term we used previously,

02:29:17.840 | ethically, morally, on all fronts.

02:29:22.220 | People have done some horrible things

02:29:27.360 | in the name of security.

02:29:28.660 | In your book, "Surprise, Kill, Vanish,"

02:29:35.060 | you write about the CIA

02:29:37.220 | and the so-called president's third option.

02:29:40.520 | It turns out, so first of all,

02:29:43.100 | the first option being diplomacy,

02:29:45.500 | and second option being war.

02:29:48.500 | So when diplomacy is inadequate

02:29:50.180 | and war is a terrible idea, we'll go to the third option.

02:29:53.900 | And this third option is about covert action,

02:29:57.860 | and it's about assassination.

02:30:01.060 | So how much of that does the CIA do?

02:30:03.320 | - That is open to debate.

02:30:06.240 | We know from the historical record

02:30:09.180 | that the CIA was heavily involved in assassination

02:30:12.020 | during the Cold War.

02:30:13.060 | That's non-negotiable.

02:30:14.500 | Even the names of the programs

02:30:18.920 | that were assigned to perform assassinations

02:30:22.060 | are fascinating and now declassified,

02:30:24.540 | like Eisenhower's, for example,

02:30:26.740 | was the Health Alteration Committee.

02:30:28.840 | - Well, at least they have a sense of humor

02:30:31.300 | into this dark topic.

02:30:33.220 | - Then the more modern names are targeted killing, right?

02:30:37.140 | Executive action, targeted killing, right?

02:30:40.500 | I mean, drone striking is essentially assassination.

02:30:44.020 | And people jump up and down and say, "That's not true."

02:30:48.580 | Well, I spent quite a long time

02:30:51.620 | interviewing the CIA's lead counsel, John Rizzo.

02:30:55.300 | He died recently.

02:30:57.260 | But Rizzo was very forthcoming with me,

02:31:00.640 | of course, never sharing classified information,

02:31:02.780 | but going up to the edge of what can legally be known,

02:31:06.080 | Rizzo was thrown under the bus

02:31:08.340 | by sort of the general public for,

02:31:12.260 | he was the fall guy for the torture campaign.

02:31:15.740 | The CIA calls it enhanced interrogation.

02:31:19.020 | And so Rizzo had this long career.

02:31:23.140 | You know, he began working

02:31:24.660 | under the Carter administration, right?

02:31:27.100 | And was responsible for the torture memos,

02:31:29.260 | was responsible for legally making sure

02:31:31.820 | the president's ass was covered,

02:31:33.640 | and then got thrown under the bus.

02:31:36.420 | And so he was very forthcoming,

02:31:38.040 | not in a bitter way, but in a very earnest way

02:31:40.060 | about a lot of how these programs are made to be legal.

02:31:44.260 | Because if the president of the United States

02:31:45.940 | says they're legal, they're legal.

02:31:47.900 | Executive order 12333, you know?

02:31:52.100 | It says we don't assassinate,

02:31:53.540 | but it can be overwritten by another order.

02:31:55.820 | That's straight out of Rizzo's mouth, right?

02:31:58.020 | Also really important to keep in mind

02:32:01.580 | is that the military operates under what's called Title 50.

02:32:05.380 | It's part of the National Security Code

02:32:07.300 | that gives sort of rules and et cetera,

02:32:11.020 | how you must behave in a war theater.

02:32:13.420 | Well, the CIA is under no such rules.

02:32:15.960 | It operates under what's called Title 50.

02:32:18.620 | And it's interesting to me as a reporter,

02:32:20.700 | 'cause before I wrote the book

02:32:21.940 | and reported openly about Title 50,

02:32:24.280 | it was not really discussed.

02:32:25.740 | And now you even see operators themselves on podcasts

02:32:28.500 | talking about Title 50, which is kind of great,

02:32:30.980 | because it's like the cat's out of the bag, guys.

02:32:33.300 | That's what it's called, and that's how it works.

02:32:35.640 | It means what we say goes.

02:32:38.600 | - Can you elaborate on what Title 50,

02:32:40.340 | so it basically says assassination is allowed?

02:32:43.300 | - It says what the president wants,

02:32:45.060 | the president gets, right?

02:32:47.340 | And so, I mean, the best example

02:32:50.620 | is the killing of bin Laden, right?

02:32:53.060 | We were not at war with Pakistan.

02:32:55.220 | So Title 50 doesn't apply.

02:32:57.100 | You can't have a military operation in a country

02:33:00.980 | you're not at war with.

02:33:01.880 | I mean, the lines, my God, now they've really blurred.

02:33:04.060 | But even then, they were a little more honored, right?

02:33:06.900 | And so what do you do?

02:33:08.260 | Well, Leon Panetta was the CIA director,

02:33:10.980 | and you work out a scenario whereby the SEALs,

02:33:17.100 | and by the way, it wasn't the SEAL,

02:33:19.580 | there was a rotational on that killer capture mission,

02:33:23.100 | which was really just a kill mission.

02:33:24.700 | SEALs were practicing, Delta was practicing,

02:33:26.900 | and Special Activities Division was practicing.

02:33:29.120 | They were all practicing at a secret facility

02:33:31.020 | in North Carolina, right?

02:33:33.020 | And it was just like, they're ready

02:33:35.140 | till they get the go order,

02:33:36.260 | and it just happened to be the SEALs, okay?

02:33:38.700 | So the SEALs operate under Title 10.

02:33:41.660 | So they had to get what I call sheep dip,

02:33:44.140 | because that's what the insiders call it, right?

02:33:45.980 | And that is a term that comes from,

02:33:47.700 | interestingly, Area 51.

02:33:49.780 | The U-2 pilots were Air Force pilots.

02:33:52.080 | They needed to be sheep dipped over to the CIA

02:33:55.220 | so they could do things that defied the law, okay?

02:33:59.660 | So you can see how these all entwine,

02:34:01.680 | and you become more and more informed,

02:34:03.220 | and you go, "Aha," right?

02:34:05.060 | So that's how Title 50 worked.

02:34:06.900 | So the night of that mission, it was a CIA mission,

02:34:10.780 | because the CIA is allowed to go into Pakistan

02:34:13.740 | and kill someone, and the military can't.

02:34:16.300 | - That's fascinating.

02:34:17.140 | So people talk about the Navy SEALs doing it,

02:34:18.880 | but it's really, legally speaking,

02:34:21.580 | to get the permission to do it

02:34:22.900 | within the whole legal framework of the United States,

02:34:25.700 | it was the CIA.

02:34:27.020 | - And if you look at their uniforms that they were wearing,

02:34:30.060 | and now that you know this, you'll be like, "Oh."

02:34:32.480 | You'll see there's no nomenclature on them.

02:34:34.560 | There's no, right?

02:34:35.460 | So those are, they're just meant

02:34:37.160 | to be completely untraceable.

02:34:39.520 | Were that, were they to be shot down and captured?

02:34:42.120 | It's like, wait, who are these guys?

02:34:43.520 | Oh, a bunch of rogue guys, okay?

02:34:45.880 | And this goes back, the origin story of all that

02:34:48.400 | is in Vietnam with Mac V. Sog,

02:34:50.840 | and these cross-border operations

02:34:52.960 | that I chronicle in "Surprise, Kill, Vanish,"

02:34:55.640 | which still amaze me to this day, right?

02:34:59.280 | I mean, Sog missions, they called it suicide on the ground,

02:35:03.140 | 'cause that's what it was.

02:35:04.340 | And these guys had no identifiable nothing.

02:35:08.560 | I mean, they were essentially in pajamas, right?

02:35:11.220 | Even their weapons were specially designed by the CIA

02:35:15.340 | to have no serial numbers, no nothing.

02:35:18.940 | So if they were captured and they became POWs,

02:35:22.260 | I don't know who these guys are.

02:35:24.660 | - What do you think,

02:35:26.340 | and how much do they think at the highest levels of power

02:35:30.080 | about the ethics of assassination

02:35:32.080 | and about the role of that in geopolitics

02:35:37.840 | and military operations?

02:35:40.060 | Like, to you maybe also,

02:35:43.480 | does assassination make sense as a good methodology of war?

02:35:48.380 | - I mean, again, I try to remain agnostic

02:35:51.560 | on the policy part of it

02:35:52.720 | and just report the operator's perspective, right?

02:35:55.360 | Because this is what people do,

02:35:57.080 | and this is what people are asked to do.

02:35:59.240 | And it depends on the individual.

02:36:02.560 | I mean, Billy Wah went on a lot of those missions.

02:36:06.120 | I mean, the saying is like,

02:36:07.360 | "Oh, Billy Wah, he killed more people than cancer," right?

02:36:11.200 | Did Billy Wah ever tell me about direct assassinations?

02:36:14.720 | No, because they're all classified, right?

02:36:17.760 | Did he tell me about some failed ones?

02:36:19.480 | Yes, I'll give you an example.

02:36:20.800 | It's really interesting.

02:36:22.000 | He would show me these PowerPoints

02:36:25.280 | that were just fantastic.

02:36:26.840 | Late in his life, he was constantly being asked

02:36:30.200 | to go up to Fort Bragg and lecture to the young soldiers.

02:36:32.800 | And everybody loved him, you know?

02:36:35.200 | And he would drive all night to get there,

02:36:38.760 | and he would create these PowerPoints,

02:36:40.160 | and then he would show me the PowerPoints,

02:36:41.400 | and he would, all unclassified.

02:36:44.040 | But at one point, when Hugo Chavez was in power,

02:36:47.440 | Billy Wah was kind of asked, that's how it works,

02:36:50.800 | of like, if you had to think about doing something,

02:36:53.040 | what would it look like, let's just say hypothetically.

02:36:55.440 | So he took me through this PowerPoint that never happened,

02:36:57.680 | whereby he and a group of operators, agency operators,

02:37:01.720 | were gonna halo jump in to the palace and grab Chavez,

02:37:05.840 | and probably kill him,

02:37:06.840 | 'cause he wouldn't allow himself to be captured.

02:37:09.080 | And, you know, what Billy, and by the way,

02:37:11.840 | halo jumping, for those of listeners who don't know,

02:37:14.280 | high altitude, low opening, right?

02:37:17.720 | So you jump out of an aircraft,

02:37:19.920 | and you go down like a pencil

02:37:22.360 | until you're really low to the deck, like 1,000 feet,

02:37:25.400 | you pull your parachute cord,

02:37:26.880 | and that way you're not picked up on radar.

02:37:29.680 | And you're also not traceable when you get to the ground,

02:37:31.920 | 'cause it's so fast.

02:37:33.320 | Billy Wah took the second halo jump in history

02:37:37.280 | into a war theater in Laos during the Vietnam War, right?

02:37:40.920 | So he's like this famous halo jumper, right?

02:37:42.880 | So he and the team were gonna go in, grab Chavez,

02:37:46.120 | and he said to me a very interesting thing

02:37:50.800 | that was kind of a one moment in time

02:37:52.320 | where I saw a different side of Billy Wah,

02:37:54.040 | where he said, "I'm so glad we didn't do that,

02:37:57.720 | "even though I really wanted to at the time.

02:38:00.680 | "Because, you know, can you imagine

02:38:03.000 | "that country's problems where it is now?

02:38:06.320 | "Can you imagine how we would have been blamed?"

02:38:10.320 | And it was an interesting, rare moment

02:38:13.320 | for Billy Wah to comment on the bigger picture

02:38:16.520 | that you're asking me about, right?

02:38:18.720 | I think pretty much the operators I know,

02:38:21.600 | they just stick to the mission.

02:38:23.600 | - So in the technical difficulty of those missions,

02:38:26.000 | just your big sense, how hard is it to assassinate,

02:38:29.240 | to assassinate a target on the soil of that nation?

02:38:35.100 | - I suppose that just depends, right?

02:38:38.080 | Here's another insightful thing Billy Wah said to me,

02:38:41.360 | and I'm answering the question around,

02:38:42.740 | because I don't know.

02:38:43.680 | Because again, you know, I never had anyone say to me,

02:38:48.080 | "Here's how it went down," right?

02:38:50.200 | Because you can't, that would be,

02:38:52.000 | first of all, those are classified.

02:38:53.720 | So I'm never gonna receive classified information.

02:38:56.680 | I did hear a lot about reconnaissance missions,

02:38:59.320 | when people would be in charge of,

02:39:01.040 | you have to be able to, what's called,

02:39:02.720 | make book on the target before, right?

02:39:05.320 | And making book on the target means photographing them,

02:39:10.520 | to really, then that gets run up the chain of command,

02:39:13.660 | to make sure this is really Imad Mugnia

02:39:16.220 | we're about to kill, right?

02:39:17.700 | But I once asked Billy,

02:39:20.620 | when I was trying to get the question,

02:39:22.300 | and he wouldn't answer it, and I said,

02:39:23.740 | "So there's another person in my book named Rick Prado,

02:39:26.060 | "who's also like a legendary agency guy."

02:39:29.020 | And so, you know, he's like 20 years younger than Billy.

02:39:33.660 | And I said, "Billy, if you and Rick had to kill each other,

02:39:39.880 | "like who would win, right?"

02:39:41.340 | I was trying to imagine this like hypothetical,

02:39:43.260 | like how would that work, who would win, right?

02:39:44.820 | And I posed the question to each of them, right?

02:39:47.580 | And of course, each of them said me, right?

02:39:52.580 | But Billy, then I went back to them,

02:39:54.860 | and Billy said, "Let me tell you how I would win."

02:39:57.940 | Okay, right?

02:39:59.340 | And he said, "I'd cheat.

02:40:01.060 | "I'd show up before the duel, and I'd kill him."

02:40:05.380 | - Yeah.

02:40:06.320 | It's such a, like, you know, I have a lot of friends

02:40:10.040 | who are Navy SEALs, it's such a guy conversation.

02:40:13.160 | - Well, you would be amazed at what the women do.

02:40:15.400 | Let me just tell you that.

02:40:16.960 | Women are a part of the Special Activities Division.

02:40:19.880 | A big part of it.

02:40:22.760 | - Can you comment on that?

02:40:24.140 | - I can.

02:40:25.480 | Women can get a hell of a lot closer to a target.

02:40:28.540 | And I mean that literally.

02:40:32.660 | - The Special Operations, do you mean,

02:40:34.080 | is this part of the CIA?

02:40:35.760 | - The Special Activities Division?

02:40:37.360 | Now it's called the Special Activities Center.

02:40:40.280 | But originally, that's the umbrella agency

02:40:43.840 | that has the different paramilitary organizations

02:40:46.760 | under it, right?

02:40:47.600 | So the most lethal one is Ground Branch.

02:40:50.260 | And that's what I reported on in Surprise Kill Vanish.

02:40:54.120 | And its origins go way back to the Guerrilla Warfare Corps

02:40:57.680 | that was started in 1947 for the president.

02:41:02.200 | - So women are also a part of the alleged assassination?

02:41:07.200 | - Absolutely.

02:41:10.120 | - And you're saying they can at times be more effective?

02:41:14.740 | I'm just gonna leave that pause there.

02:41:20.900 | The reason I ask of how difficult the assassinations are,

02:41:24.880 | you know, with Bin Laden, it took a long time.

02:41:27.240 | So I guess the reconnaissance, the intelligence

02:41:31.600 | for finding the target, I imagine with Mossad,

02:41:36.000 | maybe the CIA now, the leadership of Hamas,

02:41:39.560 | of the military branch of Hamas is much wanted

02:41:44.560 | from an assassination perspective.

02:41:46.920 | So to me as an outside observer,

02:41:49.160 | it seems like it's more difficult than you would imagine.

02:41:52.420 | But perhaps that's the intelligence aspect of it,

02:41:56.400 | not the actual assassination of locating the person.

02:42:00.200 | - Well, I think it's because mostly,

02:42:02.960 | from what I understand, it's a really dirty game

02:42:06.040 | and people are covering for people, right?

02:42:08.240 | And I'll give you the example

02:42:09.520 | of Billy Wah and Imad Mugna, if I may, right?

02:42:12.820 | So Imad Mugna was the most wanted terrorist

02:42:15.740 | in the world before Bin Laden.

02:42:17.240 | Hezbollah's chief of operations.

02:42:21.200 | And he was wanted by every, you know, Mossad, John Down.

02:42:25.160 | But no one could find him.

02:42:26.440 | He was missing for 20 years.

02:42:27.720 | There wasn't even a photograph of him.

02:42:29.960 | And then he resurfaced.

02:42:31.760 | And of all places, he resurfaced in Saudi Arabia, okay?

02:42:36.760 | So what, that's when I say it's a dirty game, right?

02:42:40.960 | Hezbollah, Iran, Hezbollah, Iran, enemies with Saudi Arabia.

02:42:45.960 | Why on earth was Imad Mugna in Saudi Arabia?

02:42:51.480 | Well, that's where he was.

02:42:53.120 | There was a Navy SEAL who was doing reconnaissance on him.

02:42:55.900 | This is according to Billy Wah.

02:42:57.800 | And this is around 2005.

02:42:59.520 | So Billy's in his eighties at this point, right?

02:43:02.480 | Late seventies, eighties.

02:43:04.600 | And he gets word that the SEAL,

02:43:08.920 | who's been tracking Mugna to get photographs of him,

02:43:11.560 | to give the photographs to Mossad and CIA

02:43:13.920 | so they can do a joint operation to kill him,

02:43:15.920 | which they did with a car bomb in Damascus.

02:43:18.800 | That's the end of the story, right?

02:43:20.280 | But how we got there was we needed, you know,

02:43:23.400 | the CIA needed confirmation.

02:43:24.840 | You can't kill the wrong person.

02:43:27.060 | So the SEAL panicked according to Billy Wah

02:43:29.640 | and was just like, I'm out of here.

02:43:30.680 | This is too dangerous.

02:43:31.720 | And I do not want to wind up in a Saudi prison.

02:43:34.440 | So who do you send in?

02:43:35.720 | Billy Wah, right?

02:43:37.680 | He shows up, he's there for 24 hours.

02:43:40.960 | He finds, he knows where Mugna lives from the SEAL.

02:43:44.080 | He positions himself in a cafe across the street,

02:43:48.240 | which is run by Sudanese men.

02:43:50.200 | And of course, Wah speaks some Sudanese

02:43:52.320 | because he operated in Sudan, right?

02:43:54.640 | And he's shooting the shit with him by his own words.

02:43:57.300 | He had the most foul mouth.

02:43:58.860 | That was just absolutely delightful to listen to.

02:44:01.340 | And then in between him and Mugna's house is a dumpster.

02:44:06.060 | And Billy Wah being Billy Wah,

02:44:07.740 | who will go to any lengths to do the job,

02:44:10.540 | decides to conduct reconnaissance from inside the dumpster.

02:44:15.540 | And that is where he is when he takes the picture

02:44:19.620 | of Imad Mugna living so comfortably in Saudi

02:44:24.620 | that Mugna, according to Billy,

02:44:26.720 | came out of his apartment building

02:44:29.160 | with dry cleaner plastic bag hangers over his shoulder.

02:44:33.320 | That's how comfortable, he lived there.

02:44:36.680 | It was his neighborhood.

02:44:38.060 | Click, click, click, Billy Wah takes the photographs,

02:44:42.520 | runs them to the CIA headquarters in Saudi at the embassy.

02:44:47.240 | Oh my God, it's Mugna, get the hell out of here.

02:44:49.940 | He gets to the airport, he leaves.

02:44:51.680 | Those photographs get sent to the agency

02:44:54.480 | and then they do the operation with Mossad

02:44:56.860 | and Mugna is dead.

02:44:58.500 | Now the truth about that being a co-CIA mission

02:45:02.900 | was not reported for many years after the fact.

02:45:06.420 | It was originally, Mossad took credit

02:45:08.300 | as the CIA often likes to just give other people credit.

02:45:11.580 | They just want the job done.

02:45:12.980 | - Well, speaking of Mossad,

02:45:15.860 | what in your understanding of all the intelligence agencies,

02:45:19.420 | what are the strengths and weaknesses

02:45:21.220 | of the different intelligence agencies out there?

02:45:25.200 | CIA, Mossad, MI6,

02:45:28.560 | SVR and FSB and Chinese intelligence,

02:45:34.340 | all this kind of stuff.

02:45:35.480 | Is there some interesting differences, insights

02:45:38.160 | that you have from all your studying of CIA?

02:45:41.440 | - That's a really interesting question.

02:45:43.000 | I don't know and here's why.

02:45:46.720 | It's because I've never interviewed any intelligence officer

02:45:49.400 | with those other agencies.

02:45:51.540 | I've interviewed a couple people with Shin Bet in Israel,

02:45:57.780 | but until I speak to an actual source whose job it was,

02:46:02.780 | I don't know.

02:46:06.940 | And so the information that I'm getting

02:46:08.620 | is based on perception of others,

02:46:12.540 | which one would think would be deeply clouded

02:46:15.460 | by the idea that America is the greatest.

02:46:18.160 | - Right.

02:46:19.000 | - Right.

02:46:19.820 | (laughing)

02:46:20.660 | - Right, right.

02:46:21.580 | - We're better than them, you know?

02:46:23.220 | - Yes, well, actually the fascinating thing

02:46:25.460 | is 'cause you've spoken to a lot of people about the CIA.

02:46:29.260 | How do you know they're telling the truth?

02:46:30.900 | Like how do you, and this actually probably applies

02:46:33.660 | generally to your interviews with very secretive people.

02:46:38.660 | How do you get past the bullshit?

02:46:41.340 | - Well, that's just like multiple sourcing, right?

02:46:45.500 | So you find the story out, and then you have to,

02:46:49.380 | you go to the National Archives and you find the operation,

02:46:51.980 | and then you learn all about this,

02:46:53.300 | and then you interview other people who were there,

02:46:55.920 | and you put the story together to the best of your ability,

02:46:58.940 | and you make very specific choices with quote,

02:47:02.420 | so-and-so said, end quote, said so-and-so, right?

02:47:06.060 | And very rarely do I report on a single source,

02:47:11.060 | as I did in the end of Area 51.

02:47:13.380 | And then it says, essentially, look, dear reader,

02:47:18.340 | this is what the source told me.

02:47:21.380 | I have no way of corroborating it.

02:47:23.620 | This is legit, and here it is.

02:47:25.460 | So that's an area to make your reader comfortable

02:47:30.460 | with the information that they're being given.

02:47:32.820 | And then in all of my books,

02:47:35.300 | whether they're three or 400 pages,

02:47:37.380 | there's always 100 pages of notes at the end.

02:47:39.860 | So you can see all the sourcing,

02:47:42.340 | and you can begin to get an understanding

02:47:45.420 | of how journalism in the national security world works.

02:47:49.420 | And also, great opportunity for me to say,

02:47:51.860 | I'm often standing on the shoulders

02:47:54.160 | of journalists before me who did an incredible job

02:47:57.940 | digging into something and being able to report

02:48:00.340 | what they knew.

02:48:01.520 | Often the books are 10, 20, 30 years old,

02:48:04.580 | and so much more has come to light since.

02:48:07.300 | - And I also would just like to say that I appreciate

02:48:10.740 | that you said, great question, I don't know.

02:48:13.820 | Not enough people say, I don't know,

02:48:17.580 | and that's a sign of a great journalist.

02:48:20.300 | But speaking about things you might not know about,

02:48:22.700 | (laughing)

02:48:24.620 | let me ask you about something going on currently.

02:48:28.680 | So recently, Alexei Navalny died in prison,

02:48:34.640 | perhaps was killed in prison.

02:48:39.060 | What's your sense from looking at it?

02:48:41.780 | Do you think he died of natural causes in prison?

02:48:44.840 | Do you think it's possible he was assassinated?

02:48:47.180 | Russia, Ukraine, Mossad, CIA,

02:48:52.620 | whoever has interest in this particular war.

02:48:56.960 | - For that, I look directly to the historical record, right?

02:49:01.860 | Having written about Russian assassination campaigns

02:49:05.260 | and programs since the earliest days of the Cold War, right?

02:49:09.980 | And Russia has a long history of assassinating,

02:49:14.100 | murdering, dissidents.

02:49:16.560 | And in "Surprise, Kill, Vanish," I tell the story

02:49:21.220 | of an actual KGB assassin named Kolkoff,

02:49:26.220 | who knocked on the door of the man he was assigned to kill

02:49:33.100 | of the man he was assigned to kill.

02:49:35.340 | And by the way, this all comes from a book

02:49:37.100 | that Kolkoff wrote later, right?

02:49:38.300 | 'Cause he defected to the United States.

02:49:39.780 | He knocks on the door and the guy answers the door.

02:49:43.080 | And instead of killing him, he has like this moment

02:49:45.780 | of conscious of crisis or crisis of conscience

02:49:49.620 | and says like, "I can't kill you,

02:49:51.500 | even though that's what I'm supposed to do."

02:49:53.580 | And then sits down with the guy and together decides,

02:49:57.420 | okay, we're gonna defect.

02:49:59.060 | You know, we're gonna let the Western intelligence agencies

02:50:03.540 | know what we're doing here.

02:50:04.860 | And the CIA got involved.

02:50:06.980 | But Russian assassins were able to poison Kolkoff

02:50:11.980 | with polonium.

02:50:14.180 | What happens to him is insane and it's a miracle

02:50:16.740 | he didn't die, but he doesn't.

02:50:18.460 | And then he defects to the West and he writes these books.

02:50:20.660 | And he tells lots of incredible secrets

02:50:23.080 | about the Russian assassination programs

02:50:25.460 | and their poison labs.

02:50:27.340 | And they're really, really, really interesting.

02:50:28.940 | And so to answer that question, I mean, to my eye,

02:50:32.060 | of course I don't know, but it certainly looks like

02:50:34.740 | Russia is acting in the same vein that it has always acted,

02:50:39.140 | taking care of dissidents that go against mother Russia.

02:50:42.140 | - So in the style of KGB assassinations,

02:50:46.440 | is there something you can comment on

02:50:51.460 | about the ways that KGB operates versus the CIA

02:50:56.700 | when we look at the history of the two organizations,

02:50:59.460 | the Cold War, after World War II, and leading up to today?

02:51:04.460 | - I mean, my feeling on that is always that

02:51:08.780 | there's a thread somewhere in declassified documentation

02:51:15.320 | about these programs of America working

02:51:22.180 | to maintain a semblance of democratic ideals,

02:51:27.180 | however surprising that may be, right?

02:51:31.420 | In other words, always trying to,

02:51:36.000 | I don't wanna say fight fair

02:51:38.460 | because killing people isn't fair,

02:51:40.500 | but versus a certain ruthlessness,

02:51:47.540 | a real sinister totalitarian type ruthlessness,

02:51:52.540 | certainly from Soviet Russia.

02:51:56.700 | I'm far less familiar with modern day

02:52:00.340 | Russian assassination activities,

02:52:03.420 | although we certainly know on the record that they exist.

02:52:07.540 | Some people have done great reporting on that.

02:52:09.840 | But there seems to be a kind of almost a sadism

02:52:17.460 | about the Russian programs

02:52:19.100 | that I personally have not seen in the American programs.

02:52:24.100 | - What about on the surveillance side?

02:52:26.620 | It seems like America's pretty good at mass surveillance,

02:52:31.100 | or at least has been revealed through NSA

02:52:33.220 | and all this kind of reporting and leaks and whistleblowers.

02:52:38.220 | Can you comment to the degree to how much surveillance

02:52:44.260 | is done by the US government internally and externally?

02:52:47.540 | - If you'd asked me five years ago,

02:52:50.940 | I would have had a very different answer, right?

02:52:52.520 | Because, all right, first of all,

02:52:54.700 | they're looking for a needle in the haystack,

02:52:56.300 | they're looking for the bin Laden,

02:52:57.500 | and they can't find the needle in the haystack,

02:52:59.340 | but they continue to create the haystack

02:53:01.620 | and survey the haystack, right?

02:53:04.260 | Okay, but the real problem, what has happened,

02:53:07.540 | and I write about this in my book, "First Platoon,"

02:53:09.660 | which is about a group of young soldiers

02:53:11.420 | who goes to Afghanistan and unwittingly becomes part

02:53:14.780 | of the Defense Department's efforts to capture biometrics

02:53:19.780 | on 85% of the population of Afghanistan, okay?

02:53:24.060 | Which, by the way, China then emulated

02:53:27.060 | in their own biometric surveillance program, right?

02:53:30.300 | And I think this is a terrible idea.

02:53:33.920 | But what has happened, these biometric systems

02:53:37.180 | that have been created, and biometrics are, of course,

02:53:39.300 | fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans,

02:53:44.300 | that allow you to tag, track, and locate people, okay?

02:53:50.620 | And what has happened in the five years

02:53:54.060 | since this question was first on everybody's minds

02:53:57.620 | about NSA surveillance is that the civilian sector companies

02:54:02.620 | have essentially done all the Defense Department's

02:54:06.940 | biometric surveillance job for them.

02:54:09.300 | By all of us sharing our facially recognizable images

02:54:14.080 | on Instagram and Facebook and everywhere else, X,

02:54:17.020 | by sharing information,

02:54:19.740 | by writing up narratives about ourselves,

02:54:22.140 | this information has become part of the database.

02:54:28.020 | Five years ago, when I was reporting "First Platoon,"

02:54:31.020 | I was interviewing the police chief of El Segundo,

02:54:34.140 | which is kind of like on the outskirts of LA.

02:54:36.180 | It's right near the airport.

02:54:37.700 | And why it's important is

02:54:38.700 | 'cause it's like defense contractor haven, okay?

02:54:41.380 | So they have massive surveillance.

02:54:44.980 | And Chief Whalen, when I posed this question to him,

02:54:47.220 | he said to me, "Annie, let me show you something."

02:54:49.780 | And he had Clearwater AI,

02:54:51.780 | the recognition software, on his phone.

02:54:55.260 | And this was still when it was quasi not supposed

02:54:57.740 | to have that for law enforcement.

02:55:00.740 | And he said, "I want you to go down the block,

02:55:02.740 | "and I want you to just turn the corner

02:55:04.880 | "and come back toward me," right?

02:55:07.020 | Which I did.

02:55:08.140 | And he just didn't even hold up his phone.

02:55:10.660 | He just kind of looked like his hand,

02:55:12.700 | and his phone was on me.

02:55:14.300 | And he went back down.

02:55:15.120 | It was like tiniest movement.

02:55:17.300 | And when I came back to him, he went like this,

02:55:19.100 | and he showed me.

02:55:20.540 | There I was, everything about me.

02:55:24.580 | Everything about me, facts and figures and all images.

02:55:29.580 | And he knew who I was before I even got to him.

02:55:34.180 | So is that a good thing or a bad thing?

02:55:36.940 | I mean, we could have another three-hour conversation

02:55:39.080 | about that alone.

02:55:40.720 | - So you're saying more and more,

02:55:42.920 | you don't need an NSA,

02:55:45.320 | where we're giving over the data ourselves.

02:55:48.120 | - Yeah.

02:55:49.160 | - Publicly or semi-publicly.

02:55:51.160 | - Yeah.

02:55:52.000 | During the war on terror,

02:55:52.900 | people were just like incensed to learn

02:55:54.720 | that there's a drone that's flying

02:55:56.920 | at something like 20,000 feet.

02:55:58.760 | It's called Argus-Is, right?

02:56:00.920 | And it can capture the,

02:56:05.100 | it's not a license plate.

02:56:06.260 | It's like it can basically capture

02:56:07.820 | like what's written on a golf ball

02:56:09.420 | from 17,000 feet, 20,000 feet up, okay?

02:56:12.460 | And people went crazy over this.

02:56:14.300 | Like, "Oh my God, it's Big Brother."

02:56:17.740 | Well, one of the lead engineers on that, Pat Bilkin,

02:56:21.340 | is someone I talk to regularly

02:56:22.620 | because we talk about surveillance a lot

02:56:24.140 | 'cause he thinks about it a lot 'cause he has kids now.

02:56:26.400 | And he has given so much thoughtful,

02:56:31.040 | really thinks about this issue

02:56:32.360 | because he believes just like you stated

02:56:34.760 | that what we are turning over about ourselves

02:56:37.800 | actually exceeds anything that Argus-Is could do from above

02:56:42.000 | because we're doing it willfully.

02:56:43.600 | And so what it's doing is it's creating an ability

02:56:46.480 | for if someone wants to know about you,

02:56:49.540 | if someone, let's say in government,

02:56:51.640 | wants to know about Lex Friedman,

02:56:53.980 | they can find out everything about you.

02:56:56.000 | And then that gets used for tagging, tracking,

02:56:59.040 | and ultimately, in the war theater,

02:57:02.640 | it was called find, fix, finish.

02:57:04.320 | Well, what do you think the finish is in that statement?

02:57:07.720 | It's not pleasant.

02:57:08.600 | It's called a drone strike.

02:57:10.560 | Find, find him with the biometric,

02:57:13.760 | fix him, meaning fix his position.

02:57:16.280 | We know he's moving in a car.

02:57:18.200 | That's him, that's him, finish him.

02:57:20.560 | Call it in, drone strike, boom.

02:57:24.480 | If we could return to nuclear war,

02:57:26.980 | you've briefly mentioned that a lot of things

02:57:32.560 | go back to the Third Reich and Hitler.

02:57:36.120 | If we go back to World War II,

02:57:39.240 | we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

02:57:42.280 | the dropping of the two bombs.

02:57:43.760 | I would love to get your opinion

02:57:47.160 | on whether we should or shouldn't have done that

02:57:49.640 | and also to get your opinion on what would have happened

02:57:52.520 | if Hitler and Germany built the bomb first.

02:57:56.480 | Do you think it was possible

02:57:57.720 | he could have built the bomb first?

02:57:59.480 | In my researching Third Reich weapons

02:58:06.240 | for Operation Paperclip,

02:58:07.520 | because of course we got a lot of those scientists after.

02:58:11.360 | It's another great book

02:58:12.520 | in a terrifyingly complicated operation.

02:58:16.600 | Yes.

02:58:18.600 | At what point do the ends justify the means, right?

02:58:22.680 | But in looking at those programs,

02:58:26.040 | and we acquired Hitler's favorite weapons designers,

02:58:30.180 | and I'm talking about weapons of mass destruction

02:58:32.380 | like chemical weapons and biological weapons.

02:58:35.120 | But of course, America was ahead in the nuclear program,

02:58:38.360 | and an interesting detail reading Albert Speer's memoirs

02:58:42.280 | was Speer referring to a conversation he had with Hitler

02:58:47.440 | where Hitler said, "No, I don't wanna do that.

02:58:51.280 | "That's Jewish science."

02:58:53.680 | And so because of Hitler's own racial ethnic prejudices,

02:58:58.680 | they didn't develop the bomb, right?

02:59:01.880 | As far as should we have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima,

02:59:05.100 | I've interviewed all kinds of people

02:59:07.840 | with different opinions,

02:59:08.740 | most of them that had ended the war.

02:59:10.640 | The best interview and most meaningful perhaps

02:59:14.900 | that I ever did was with Al O'Donnell

02:59:16.520 | who was a participant in the Battle of Okinawa,

02:59:19.200 | which was like this insane,

02:59:21.340 | just to read stories about Okinawa,

02:59:25.240 | it makes your hair stand on end.

02:59:28.000 | And O'Donnell, like so many others,

02:59:31.400 | was slated to invade mainland Japan

02:59:36.400 | to his almost certain death, right?

02:59:40.700 | So somebody like that, it makes sense right from the get-go

02:59:44.840 | why he would be pro nuclear weapons.

02:59:48.880 | It saved his own personal life

02:59:51.320 | and it saved everyone that he knew that he was fighting with

02:59:55.200 | and it ended the war.

02:59:57.400 | - Do you think it sent a signal?

03:00:00.560 | Like without that, we wouldn't have known perhaps

03:00:03.160 | about the power of the weapons.

03:00:05.480 | So in the long arc of that history, 70 years plus,

03:00:13.520 | it is the reason why deterrence has worked so far.

03:00:17.480 | - Yes, that's an interesting thought.

03:00:21.760 | My thought goes to this idea that like of more, right?

03:00:26.760 | That everybody always wants more.

03:00:28.840 | It's a very dangerous, it's like more power, literally,

03:00:32.760 | not just figure it, more power, right?

03:00:35.120 | And what is more confounding to me

03:00:39.080 | beyond the fact that we dropped two atomic bombs

03:00:44.080 | on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war ended

03:00:47.780 | is that this decision was then made

03:00:50.720 | to develop the thermonuclear bomb,

03:00:54.080 | a force that is such,

03:00:56.840 | the degree of magnitude of that power is mind boggling.

03:01:01.080 | I mean, even projects within the Manhattan Project

03:01:05.760 | defined thermonuclear weapon,

03:01:08.680 | the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing.

03:01:12.320 | Like it was evil, it's a weapon of genocide.

03:01:15.640 | Atomic weapons destroy cities.

03:01:19.200 | Thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.

03:01:26.060 | - You opened the book with a Churchill quote,

03:01:30.800 | "The story of the human race is war,

03:01:34.000 | except for brief and precarious interludes,

03:01:37.520 | there has never been peace in the world.

03:01:40.280 | And before history began,

03:01:42.600 | murderous strife was universal and unending."

03:01:46.800 | Do you think there will always be war?

03:01:50.780 | Do you think that there is some deep human way

03:01:56.360 | in which we're tending

03:01:58.160 | to this kind of global war eternally?

03:02:02.900 | - Well, the optimistic answer of that would be

03:02:05.640 | that we could evolve beyond that, right?

03:02:09.080 | Because certainly if we look at our ancestors,

03:02:13.060 | they had not developed their consciousness

03:02:17.620 | as far as we have

03:02:20.820 | to be able to build the tools that we have.

03:02:24.600 | And so the hopeful answer is we will evolve beyond

03:02:30.260 | this kind of brute force, kill the other guy attitude.

03:02:34.600 | Certainly, these are questions

03:02:39.660 | that will become more obvious over time.

03:02:43.020 | I just want to play my little part in this world

03:02:47.940 | that I live in as the storyteller

03:02:51.160 | who brings information to people

03:02:54.020 | so that they can have these kinds of questions

03:02:59.260 | with themselves, with their friends, with their families.

03:03:02.740 | And I think in asking that very question,

03:03:05.820 | what you're really saying is

03:03:07.620 | why don't we evolve beyond war fighting?

03:03:12.620 | - It is very possible.

03:03:17.060 | And your book is such a stark and powerful reminder

03:03:20.900 | that human civilization as we know it ends in this century.

03:03:26.300 | Let's say it's a good motivator to get our shit together.

03:03:31.300 | - But aren't you really saying

03:03:37.700 | human civilization could end, not it ends?

03:03:41.440 | - Could end. - Could end.

03:03:44.240 | - But the power of our weapons is growing rapidly.

03:03:49.620 | So.

03:03:52.180 | - As they say, it's time to come back from the brink, right?

03:03:54.980 | And it's time to have that discussion

03:03:57.020 | while we're still talking.

03:03:58.940 | - And there's another complexity

03:04:02.780 | sneaking up into the picture

03:04:04.420 | in the form of artificial intelligence.

03:04:07.900 | And in cyber war, but also in hot war,

03:04:12.900 | the use of autonomous weapons,

03:04:15.020 | all of it starts becoming super complicated

03:04:18.540 | as we delegate some of these decisions about war,

03:04:22.660 | including nuclear war, to more and more autonomy

03:04:25.620 | and artificial intelligence systems.

03:04:27.940 | It's gonna be a very interesting century.

03:04:30.800 | Do you, just to zoom out a little bit,

03:04:33.780 | hope that we become a multi-planetary species?

03:04:36.860 | - I'm all for adventure.

03:04:38.200 | - And I too, while I'm for adventure,

03:04:44.100 | I'm all for backups in all forms.

03:04:47.900 | So I hope that humans start a civilization on Mars

03:04:51.300 | and beyond out in space.

03:04:53.260 | And if you zoom out on across all of it,

03:04:56.300 | what gives you hope about human civilization,

03:05:00.420 | about this whole thing we have going on here?

03:05:02.660 | - I mean, I am a fundamentally optimistic person.

03:05:05.960 | I must've come out of the chute that way

03:05:07.780 | because I just am, right?

03:05:09.420 | Even though I write about really grim things,

03:05:12.440 | I get inspired by them

03:05:15.460 | because I do always believe in evolution, right?

03:05:17.860 | I also have like the greatest family ever.

03:05:20.780 | Two kids, Jet and Finley, shout out to them.

03:05:23.740 | They're Lex Friedman fans, you know?

03:05:26.160 | - Oh yes.

03:05:27.200 | - And my husband.

03:05:29.700 | And you know, so what inspires me is like this idea

03:05:32.900 | of legacy.

03:05:33.720 | I think that you always wanna have your eye

03:05:37.060 | on being a good example to the best that you can.

03:05:40.660 | And so, and passing on what you know

03:05:43.780 | and believing kind of in the next generation.

03:05:47.340 | And again, that's a sentiment echoed

03:05:49.460 | by all these cold warriors I've been talking to

03:05:51.740 | because they also share that.

03:05:53.940 | That idea that, wow, look at what we have done

03:05:59.060 | as a civilization and look where we're going,

03:06:01.260 | whether it's exoplanetary travel or AI.

03:06:06.260 | It's just that the human factor of like the desire to fight,

03:06:12.900 | the desire to have conflict needs to be reconfigured

03:06:17.900 | because with all these new technologies that we have,

03:06:22.900 | the peril is growing at an accelerating pace,

03:06:27.300 | perhaps faster than the average human can keep up with.

03:06:31.220 | - Well, Annie, thank you for being a wonderful example

03:06:34.700 | of a great journalist, a great writer, a great human being.

03:06:38.860 | And I'm a big fan of yours.

03:06:41.000 | It's a huge honor to meet you, to talk with you today.

03:06:43.660 | So thank you so much for talking today.

03:06:46.060 | - Thank you for having me.

03:06:47.960 | - Thank you for listening to this conversation

03:06:49.620 | with Annie Jacobson.

03:06:51.060 | To support this podcast,

03:06:52.300 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:06:54.940 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:06:56.900 | from John F. Kennedy.

03:06:58.660 | "The very word secrecy is repugnant

03:07:03.420 | in a free and open society.

03:07:05.340 | And we are, as a people inherently

03:07:07.660 | and historically opposed to secret societies,

03:07:10.220 | to secret oaths and to secret proceedings."

03:07:13.780 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:07:18.140 | (upbeat music)

03:07:20.720 | (upbeat music)

03:07:23.300 | you

03:07:25.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420

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